W.C.Rives. 




BRIEF ESSAYS 

AND 

BREVITIES 



BRIEF ESSAYS 



BREVITIES 



: Y 



GEORGE H. CALVERT 



BOSTON : 

LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 

New York: 

LEE, SHEPARD AND DILLINGHAM. 

1874. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

George H. Calvert, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



OF 
WILLIAM C. RIVES 
APRIL, 1940 



riverside, Cambridge: 

stereotyped and printed by 

k. o. houghton and company. 



CONTENTS. 

— I . 

ESSAYS. 

I. Earthlings 9 

II. Ladyhood 12 

III. Genius and Talent 17 

IV. Aristocracy 22 

V. Organization 29 

VI. Work 35 

VII. Social Palace at Guise .... 42 

VIII. WORLDLINESS 49 

IX. Art 55 

X. Travel 61 

XI. Obedience . . . . . . .70 

XII. Freedom 73 

XIII. The Brain 78 

XIV. Materialism 90 

XV. The Life to Come 96 

XVI. Books for Boys 106 

XVII. F. W. Robinson 115 

XVIII. Goethe's Faust 123 

XIX. Shelley 129 

XX. Shakespeare 140 

XXI. The Merchant of Venice . . . .149 



6 CONTENTS. 

XXII. Taming of the Shrew . . . . 154 

XXIII. The Tempest 157 

XXIV. Macbeth 167 

XXV. Hamlet 177 

BREVITIES. 

I. Spiritual, Moral 193 

II. Literary, ^Esthetical 208 

III. Conduct, Manners . . . . . 239 

IV. Miscellaneous 255 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 



EARTHLINGS. 

When one has just spent an hour in a police 
court or the " Tombs," or reads of the diver- 
sified daily crimes by countless criminals, or 
clipping personally into Wall Street, feels him- 
self a party to the selfish scramble which makes 
up so much of life, or tries to count the lies 
that are sneaking or buzzing about, or thinks 
of the manifold rascalities, rampant or covert, 
and the multiform sensualities that darken and 
deform humanity, — one might, in certain moods, 
be misled to believe that man is, after all, but a 
low, creeping slave, the dupe of vulgar desires 
and ignoble impulses, a restless, insatiable 
earthling. Earthling though he be, his eye 
carries his thought up to stars whose light has 
been thousands of years in reaching him ; and 
there, his inward vision dazzled with the tran- 
scendent grandeur of creation, he is at once 



10 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

humbled and exalted ; and humility and exalta- 
tion both attest a higher than a mere earthly 
being. 

Within his magnetic brain are other cham- 
bers, built to be opened to deeper medita- 
tion, to be illuminated by still finer light. 
" Only by celestial observations can terrestrial 
charts be constructed," says Jean Paul. In 
man there is an upper heavenly sphere ; only 
by help of this can be instituted and conducted 
an orderly human life. Unguided, untempered 
by these nobler capacities, even the lower could 
not accomplish their specific functions. Here 
is the celestial canopy which gives amplitude 
and security to man's being. The vaulting 
sweep of disinterested feeling, open to men, 
constitutes their humanity, their divine hu- 
manity. Without the breadth and freedom of 
this upper range, men were not men, but a 
herd of low-cropping bipeds. Take from a 
man his capacity to be just, to be charitable, 
to bound up from the very depths of despair 
upon ever-surging waves of hope, to feel at 
times a thrill shoot through him from Infini- 
tude, — cut him off from all this, and you dis- 
crown him, you disorb him. By no intellectual 
projection, by no scientific dexterity, can he be 



EARTHLINGS. 1 1 

launched and upheld on his proper path. Only 
the power of trustful intuition, of a sure moral 
sensibility, can lift and hold him to his human 
track. Destroy this power, and he flounders in 
the mire of animalism. A more appalling sight 
could not be than a scientific animal, a being 
endowed only with impulse and full intellect. 
And think (if the imagination can stretch 
itself to such an abstraction) of a tribe of 
such : I do not say community, for community 
there could not be, that implying an organized 
combination for the general good ; and where 
men were purely selfish, there could be no per- 
manent combination, no tenacious apportion- 
ment. Think of a crowd of Calibans and sons 
of Mephistopheles : nay, a crowd even of such 
miscreations could not be. Either, they would 
fly asunder by mutual repulsion, or assail each 
other's being ruthlessly and destructively. But 
the beauty and grandeur of the divine scheme 
exclude such monsters. In the worst speci- 
mens of our kind, in a Nero or a Borgia, 
there stirs the germ of the generic and noble. 
Through the darkest and coldest nature pene- 
trates somewhat of the light from a holy inter- 
nal fire. Did there not, the individual would 
shiver and burst in his own icy darkness. Pure 
black cannot be. 



II. 

LADYHOOD. 

Examples of ladyhood should not be sought 
in the Sultan's seraglio ; for ladyhood implies 
independence of spirit and womanly self-re- 
spect, with ableness for self-direction ; nor 
would one look for the higher illustrations in 
a community coarse and unfashioned ; for la- 
dyhood is an emanation from the heart, sub- 
tilized by culture. Nor would you be likely to 
come upon the finer type among the rings of 
the garish, bedizened, recurrent whirl of fash- 
ion ; for a continued blaze of publicity is no 
more favorable to the growth of ladyhood than 
is gas-light to the ripening of rose-buds. La- 
dies of the purest water hesitate not to enter 
Broadway, but they neither seek nor enjoy an 
ostentatious thoroughfare. The glare of its 
gaze, if too often submitted to, dries the au- 
roral moisture which glistens on the counte- 
nance of ladyhood, — aye, glistens when years 
have pinched the smoothness of outward beauty.* 

Only through example and authority can the 



LADYHOOD. 1 3 

lady be unfolded. The earthly angel 01 girl- 
hood is matronly womanhood, ever hovering 
near its trust. Youth, permitted to be un- 
bound and irreverent, runs into excesses, which 
sap its chasteness and its strength. Of ado- 
lescence maturity is the guardian appointed by 
nature ; and nature ever punishes with impris- 
onment a breach of her mandates. The guard- 
ianship of matrons over girls is the guardian- 
ship of their freedom ; and freedom not thus 
guarded, carries a latent chain in its temporary 
license. 

Any, even the slightest, decrement of mod- 
esty lays a weight upon the spring of ladyhood, 
whose essence is a refined womanly self-con- 
sciousness. Nature's choicest product is wo- 
man ; and modesty being the interior fount 
that suffuses her with spiritual bloom, lady- 
hood, as the consummate flower, the florescent 
acme, of womanhood, a distillation from its su- 
perlatives, draws from this fount a perennial 
freshness. Thence, the wealthiest dower where- 
with a maiden can enter womanhood is modest 
reserve. From this deep, clear, sparkling 
source are recruited all the feminine virtues 
of her life. We say modest reserve ; for there 
is a cold and a proud reserve, and these are 



14 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

barren. Modesty implies warmth, and a living 
store of power ; denotes impulses, emotions, 
desires, to be directed, protected, controlled ; 
and reserve betokens capacity to protect and 
control this palpitating material of conduct 

" All integrants of being, the low and higher, 
The lords of work, the visionary powers, 
Leap with the lightnings of a holier fire," 

in a woman whose speech and bearing are ever 
thus guarded. A lady of the highest type is 
the unmatched 

" Delight of whate'er lives and wills and loves, 
The central majesty to all that moves ; " 

and to be this, her life must be steadied, re- 
freshed, empowered by modest reserve. 

Does it seem that in estimating ladyhood I 
set too much store by purity and continence, 
the wardens of a treasure whose unspeakable 
value is only revealed by what is missed when 
it is lost. Whoever called a lorette a lady? 
Among the richest in physical beauty and in 
wit she may be, with generosity even of heart ; 
but so poor is she spiritually, there is none will 
do her reverence. Fallen from her height of 
womanhood, none now looks up to her. She 
has forfeited her eminence, and lives without 



LADYHOOD. 1 5 

honor, without command, without obedience. 
She is scarcely a person, is become almost a 
thing. Her being is blind with the gloom of 
self-destruction. The threads wherewith is 
woven the exquisite veil of ladyhood — a veil 
protective, which is a transparent beautifier — 
must themselves be wrought of cleanest mate- 
rial, their delicate fineness proceeding from 
their strength, and their strength from their 
purity. Not an outward gauze, not a super- 
added screen is this veil ; it is self-spun, inly 
woven, a spiritual lacework, only traceable in 
the flush of its twinkle, the subtlest of mag- 
netic auras, permeating and illuminating with 
delicate light the finer fibres of conduct. 

If the nest wherein ladyhood is hatched be 
modesty, out of beauty, spiritual beauty, are 
wrought the wings wherewith it soars to its 
serene dominance. Of the higher type of la- 
dyhood may always be said what Steele said 
of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, that u unaffected 
freedom and conscious innocence gave her the 
attendance of the graces in all her actions." 
At its highest, ladyhood implies a spirituality 
made manifest in poetic grace. From the lady 
there exhales a subtler magnetism. Uncon- 
sciously she circles herself with an atmosphere 



1 6 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

of unruffled strength, which, to those who 
come into it, gives confidence and repose. 
Within her influence the diffident grow self- 
possessed, the impudent are checked, the in- 
considerate admonished ; even the rude are 
constrained to be mannerly, and the refined 
are perfected ; all spelled unawares by the 
charm of the flexible dignity, the commanding 
gentleness, the thorough womanliness of her 
look, speech, and demeanor. A sway is this 
purely spiritual. Every sway, every legitimate, 
every enduring, sway is spiritual, a regnancy 
of light over obscurity, of right over brutality. 
The only real gains we ever make are spiritual 
gains, — a further subjection of the gross to the 
incorporal, of body to soul, of the animal to 
the human. The finest, the most characteris- 
tic acts of a lady involve a spiritual ascension, 
a going out of herself. In her being and bear- 
ing, patience, benignity, generosity, are the 
graces that give shape to the virtues of truth- 
fulness. In the radiant reality of ladyhood the 
artificial and the conventional are naught. Dif- 
ferent from, opposite to, the superpositions of 
art, or the dictates of mode, is the culture of 
the innate, the unfolding of the living ; as dif- 
ferent as the glow of health is from the cos- 
metic stain that would counterfeit its tint. 



III. 

GENIUS AND TALENT. 

Cruden's and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's " Con- 
cordances " show that in the Bible the word 
genius is never found, the word talent only as 
a measure of money ; and that in Shakespeare 
genius (occurring but seven times) stands for 
guardian spirit or what is akin, and of the 
fourteen times that talent is read, ten are in 
" Timon," being there always used in the an- 
cient Athenian sense, as a standard of money- 
value. In the prolific Elizabethan period, and 
for some time later, these two words had not 
set themselves into the important positions 
they have since held in the language. Im- 
portant we call them, for the two express so 
much of the inward mysterious power, and the 
varied aptitudes of the human mind, that their 
suppression now were a laming of habitual ut- 
terance. Hence their so frequent use in criti- 
cism and conversation, and hence the endeavor 
of critics and aestheticians to define the mean- 



1 8 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

ing of each, and to distinguish the one from 
the other. 

Genius is of the soul, talent of the under- 
standing. Genius is warm, talent is passion- 
less. Without genius there is no intuition, 
no inspiration ; without talent, no execution. 
Genius is interior, talent exterior ; hence ge- 
nius is productive, talent accumulative. Genius 
invents, talent accomplishes. Genius gives the 
substance ; talent works it up under the eye, 
or, rather, under the feeling of genius. Genius 
is emotional, talent intellectual ; hence genius 
is creative, and talent instrumental. Genius 
has insight, talent only outsight. Genius is 
always calm, reserved, self-centred ; talent is 
often bustling, officious, confident. Genius 
gives the impulse and aim as well as the illu- 
mination, talent the means and implements. 
Genius, in short, is the central, finer essence 
of the mind, the self-lighted fire, the intuitional 
gift. Talent gathers and shapes and applies 
what genius forges. Talent is ever approach- 
ing, and yet never reaches, that point whence 
genius starts. Genius is often entirely right, 
and is never wholly wrong; talent is never 
wholly right. Genius avails itself of all the 
capabilities of talent, appropriates to itself what 



GENIUS AND TALENT. 1 9 

suits and helps it. Talent can appropriate to 
itself nothing ; for it has not the inward heat 
that can fuse all material, and assimilate all 
food, to convert it into blood ; this only genius 
can do. Goethe was a man of genius and, at 
the same time, of immense and varied talents ; 
and no contemporary profited so much as he 
did by all the knowledges and discoveries and 
accumulations made by others. For full suc- 
cess the two, genius and talent, should co-exist 
in one mind in balanced proportions, as they 
did in Goethe's, so that they can play smoothly 
together in effective combination. In Walking 
Stewart, says De Quincey, genius was out of 
all proportion to talent, and thus wanted an 
organ for manifesting itself. 

The work of the world, even the higher 
ranges, being done by talent, talent, backed 
by industry, is sure to achieve outward suc- 
cess. Commonplace is the smooth road on 
which are borne the freights that supply the 
daily needs of life. Genius, to be sure, as 
the originator of all appliances and aids and 
motions and improvements, is the parent of 
what is to-day common, of all that talent has 
turned to practical account ; but genius, when 
it first exhibits itself, is as alarming and hate- 



20 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

ful to talent and routine as the first locomo- 
tives were to the drivers and horses of the 
mail-coach. Even on the highest plane of 
literature, the poetical, talent wins laurels more 
readily, and at first more abundantly, than 
genius. Scott and Moore were, by their con- 
temporaries, much more valued as poets than 
Wordsworth and Coleridge. Scott and Moore 
were men of genius, but of far less genial in- 
sight than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and 
with more literary talent. Hence they were 
accessible to the many, and were by the semi- 
critics, men of mere talent, like Jeffrey and 
Gifford, absolutely as well as relatively over- 
rated. Their genius gives liveliness to the 
commonplaces of feeling and adventure, a 
sheen to surfaces that were otherwise dull ; 
but their pages lack the sparkle that issues 
out of recesses suddenly illuminated by im- 
aginative collisions, a subtle, joyful blaze flash- 
ing up from new marriages between thought 
and sentiment, — marriages that can only be 
consecrated by the high priests of thought, 
and which stand forever inviolate, and for- 
ever productive, in the best verse of Keats and 
Shelley. 

Genius involves a more than usual suscepti- 



GENIUS AND TALENT. 21 

bility to divine promptings, a delicacy in spirit- 
ual auscultation, a quick obedience to the 
invisible helmsman ; and these high superiori- 
ties imply fineness and fullness of organization. 
The man of genius is subject, says Joubert, 
to " transport, or rather rapture, of mind." 
In this exalted state he has glimpses of truths, 
beauties, principles, laws, that are new revela- 
tions, and bring additions to human power. 
Goethe might have been thinking of Kepler, 
when he said, " Genius is that power of man 
which by thought and action gives laws and 
rules ; " and Coleridge of Milton when he 
wrote, " The ultimate end of genius is ideal ; " 
and Hegel may have had Michael Angelo in 
his mind when, in one of his chapters on the 
plastic arts, he affirms that "talent cannot do 
its part fully without the animation (Besee- 
lung), the besouling, of genius." Schiller con- 
cludes an apostrophe to Columbus with these 
lines : — 

" Trust to the guiding God, follow the silent sea : 

Were not yet there the shore, 'twould now rise from the 
wave ; 
For nature is to genius linked eternally, 
And ever will perform the promise genius gave." 



IV. 

ARISTOCRACY. 

Aspiration is a universal instinct. Vines 
ever strive to lay hold of what will help them 
to climb. Forest oaks vie with each other 
which shall ascend highest into the light and 
air. The mineral aspires toward the vegetable, 
the vegetable toward the animal kingdom. From 
zoophyte to man each type is, at its best, a 
" mute prophecy " of the one above it. Up- 
ward, upward, is an innate impulse of whatever 
lives. All being struggles to ascend, thereby 
to better itself, for every mounted degree is a 
gain of freedom, and freedom, the highest aim 
of life, is the gauge of advancement. The tree 
is freer than the rock, and the bird that builds 
in its boughs is freer than the tree, and man is 
freer than any other animal, and his freedom 
is in precise proportion to the degree that the 
animal in him is subordinated to the human ; 
and among individual men, as among nations, 
elevation, relative and absolute, is in the ratio 



ARISTOCRACY. 2$ 

of freedom, — the freest man approximating, 
while yet on the earth to the emancipated con- 
dition of the angels. 

In the political and the social spheres the 
mounting instinct is ever active, and more dif- 
fused and lively now than in any past genera- 
tion is this activity, because, since our inde- 
pendence and the French Revolution, there is 
in Christendom more freedom of movement than 
at any previous stage of history. La carrihe 
ouverte aux talents is not a windy boast ; it is a 
transforming, vivifying reality, whereby France, 
as a state, has been for thirty years much more 
of an aristocracy than ever before ; that is, in 
her political administration she has had more 
of her stronger men than she had under the 
kings and nobles who for centuries were her 
sole governors. Hereditary governors, one or 
many, are pseudo-aristocrats. Nature says to 
man : Choose ye for rulers the best I furnish, 
but do not dare encroach on my large function 
by aiming to confine the virtues and faculties 
of rulership to a few families. This is, with 
man's shallow devices, to try to overrule the 
deep laws of nature. Disastrous are all these 
attempts ; for not only does Nature in her 
breadth and justice, discountenance such mo- 



24 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

nopoly, but in maturing her best specimens 
she exhausts the particular stock, so that the 
descendants of a great man are mostly like the 
parings and fragments of a feast, the potency of 
nature culminating in the one glorious product, 
the juices of the stock whence she drew it 
being by so deep a draught exhausted. Hence 
it is that the English " nobility " has been more 
of an aristocracy than the " noblesse " of France 
or that of other continental nations. It has not 
been so counter to nature; it has not been a 
caste ; it has sucked at the breast of the mighty 
multitude. Less pure in blood heraldically, its 
blood is richer, more prolific, essentially more 
aristocratic. Take from England her Wolseys, 
and Burleighs, and Bacons, and Cromwells, and 
Somersets, and Clives, and Nelsons, and Pitts, 
and Foxes, and Cannings, and Peels, all ple- 
beians, and you unman her history. Had not 
the blood of her hereditary rulers been thus 
refreshed and invigorated, her De Veres, and 
Tudors, and Percys, and Nevilles, and Howards 
would not have been so powerful and so 
famous. It is the virtue of the English polity, 
or of the English character, that under mon- 
archic and oligarchic forms, high and highest 
places are kept open to the men fittest for 



ARISTOCRACY. 2$ 

regency, nature's aristocrats, drawn often from 
the lower strata of the social pile. 

For its prosperous administration and endur- 
ance a republic has especial need of nature's 
aristocrats, of the best men engendered in its 
bosom. For a republic stands and thrives on 
self-government, and self-government can only 
draw its breath of life from character. Among 
the citizens of a large modern republic, if it is 
to last, there must be prevalent that union of 
good intentions with intelligence which results 
in common sense ; and common sense demands 
of the members of a republic or democracy 
that in choosing administrators, they know 
who are the best citizens, and have the will to 
take them. Thus a republic, for its welfare, 
should be able not only to breed capable, 
honest men, nature's aristocrats, but, having 
bred them, be so alive to noble interests as to 
put them into its high places. In a word, a 
republic, to thrive, should be a democratic 
aristocracy, which is the same as to say it 
should be ruled by its best heads. Elections 
should be wise selections. A man without 
faith in humanity, or one with vision bounded 
to self-seeking goals, or one constitutionally 
despondent, might readily despair of our re- 



26 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

public on reviewing the men who, in the past 
decade or two, have made and administered 
laws at Washington. For a score of years we 
have been going from bad to worse ; and unless 
we have reached the worst, unless by an inward 
motion (part instinctive, part conscious) we 
soon swing ourselves up out of the rapacious 
rankness, the mercenary filth, which from stain- 
ing our garments is beginning to infect our 
pores with its poison ; unless we delegate our 
vast sovereign power to better men, to larger 
men, to freer men, that is, to men less the 
slaves of self-seeking, — unless, in short, we 
soon reverse our movement and ascend vigor- 
ously into a lighter, purer air, the tremors of 
the despondent and the faithless will shape 
themselves into the fears of the thoughtful and 
the hopeful, and these will have to look deeper 
than political forms and principles for the means 
of keeping the higher interests of a great people 
from being sacrificed to the lower, and of 
counteracting the demoralizing influence of 
narrow egotisms and a general relaxing mate- 
rialism. 

History teaches that artificial, nominal aris- 
tocracies run to despotism or uphold it; and 
that whenever a state has thriven, under what- 



ARISTOCRACY. 27 

ever form, monarchical, oligarchical, or repub- 
lican, it has thriven through the agency of 
genuine aristocracy, that is, through having its 
best men at the political helm. 

In the social sphere aspiration is still more 
lively and pertinacious. Here refinement fur- 
nishes the wings for ascent. In the long run 
those individuals and breeds most open to 
impressions of the beautiful, and thence most 
capable of culture, form the nucleus and are 
the stamina of social superiorities. From this 
class (when social conditions have some free- 
dom of play) accretions are ever a-making to 
supply the losses incurred by forfeiture of in- 
herited social position, — forfeiture through lack 
of sensibilities to value and retain a polish, 
through lack of manly bottom to maintain a 
gentlemanly conduct and carriage, of delicacy 
to appreciate beauties of bearing, subtleties of 
demeanor. As in the political, so in the social 
sphere, there are assumptions, pretensions, 
audacious usurpations, and especially there are 
the oligarchic impudences of fashion to mar and 
weaken ; but what is real and pure, what is 
truly aristocratic, what is the best socially, is 
a projection beyond the limited self into a sphere 
of aesthetic association. " Good society," if it 



28 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

be not an arrogated name, not vulgarized by 
ostentatious ambitions, but if it be essentially 
good, is, like art, an issue out of the finer 
sensibilities. It is the flowering of the social 
tree, not a mere fragile ornament on the top, 
and gracefully embodies the essence of that 
which it surmounts, carrying in its folds the 
seed for reproduction. 

In an advanced civilization the desire for 
social preferment vibrates through the whole 
frame of a people. The late Dr. Bowditch, the 
eminent mathematician, used to tell a story of 
a serving-maid who related how her engage- 
ment had been broken off through objections 
made by the friends of her lover to the position 
of herself and her family. " Why, Lucy," said 
the doctor, " I did not know that you had an 
aristocracy in your class." " Aristocracy ! " 
rejoined Lucy/ " we have more down there 
than you have up here." The masses, it has 
been said, have the sense of the ideal. Had 
they it not, there would be no great poets, for 
these are a subtle distillation out of the juices 
that give life and character to the mind of a 
people. The aristocracy " up here " owes much 
of its quality to the quality of the aristocracy 
" down there." 



V. 

ORGANIZATION. 

The ecclesiastical and military institutions 
of the Middle Ages grew out of the latent 
capacities of European manhood. They were 
protective shells wrought out of man's instincts 
for the safety of his body and of his soul. 
Clumsily were they wrought : so was astrol- 
ogy ; but had there been no star-ward need 
that first vented itself in creating astrology, 
the grandeurs and uses of astronomy would 
to us have never been revealed. The military 
apparatus enabled civil and industrial organ- 
ization to form and strengthen. The Church 
did similarly for the mind, giving to thought a 
channel, and thus saving it, in dark ignorant 
times, from running loose on wide surfaces, 
where it could have neither depth nor current, 
and would have tended to wayward expansion, 
and thence to wasting evaporation. These 
institutions denoted in the European popula- 
tion power of development and self-protection. 
Among the inhabitants of tropical Asia and 



30 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

Africa are no such beginnings : these feel lit- 
tle inward motion towards, and have not ca- 
pacities for, graduated outward arrangement 
They never shape themselves into organic 
wholes ; they are little more than aggrega- 
tions of shiftless individualities ; and hence 
they do not emerge into civilization. The 
need of, and capacity for, organization are the 
mark of mental breadth and resources. 

To secure enjoyment and growth, the mind, 
with help of its executive constituent, intel- 
lect, builds for its behoof artificial structures, 
to shelter and further its activities. Being 
artificial, man-made, these structures are tem- 
porary. Even the natural body, which is God- 
made for the individualization of soul, is tem- 
porary, quickly mortal. Organizations, devised 
by human intellect, are become obstructions, 
usurpations, when they cease to be auxiliary 
to the strength and play of the higher mental 
powers, for whose service they first arose. In 
man-made organizations there is an inherent 
tendency to materiality, to grossness ; and a 
sign it is that they have become material and 
gross, when they are no longer subordinated 
to the spiritual, but would govern and bound 
it, when they have become end instead of 



ORGANIZA TION. 3 1 

means, masters instead of servants. Such the 
ecclesiastical institutions of Europe had be- 
come in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif- 
teenth centuries. Men were imprisoned in 
the Church. The mind, the light of manhood, 
the creative core, the source of life and worth, 
the mind was weakened, maimed, blindfolded, 
was thwarted and smitten by the very insti- 
tution designed to enlarge and second it ; as 
though a citadel should come to be controlled 
by its own outworks, as though a parent were 
bound and scourged by his own children. But 
the same inward force that first promoted the 
organization stirred to rend it, now that it 
had grown worldly and tyrannical. Many were 
the voices raised in protest, and many were 
the martyrs of freedom ; some of them like 
Wickliffe and Huss and Savonarola, so full of 
light that they still throw light on our path. 
At last from the heart of Germany came a 
voice stronger and clearer than any yet heard, 
the voice of Luther. This giant rent in twain 
the huge fabric of Roman ecclesiastical dom- 
ination. How broad was the rent, how ir- 
reconcilably hostile were the two camps into 
which his manly might had split Christen- 
dom, Luther himself was hardly aware. More 



32 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

grandly and far more deeply than he knew, 
Luther was the assertor and spokesman of 
mental independence. Thenceforward one-half, 
and the stronger half of the Christian world, 
was open to free organization. 

The largest, the most prolific right that man 
has ever achieved is the right of private judg- 
ment. In the beginning it was a protest of 
the free against the despotic, of the spiritual 
against the mechanical and material ; and it 
insures the final triumph of the free and spir- 
itual in all provinces of human being and 
endeavor. For in the right of private judg- 
ment is involved the power to exercise it, and 
the successful exercise implies capacity for, 
nay, possession of, social and political organi- 
zation ; and the higher this is the more com- 
plicated will it be. Note the simplicity and 
one-sidedness of life under despotic govern- 
ments in all ages and continents, and then 
the diversity and the many-sidedness of Amer- 
ican republican life. A distinctive feature of 
our country is the number of associations, 
combinations, institutions, which, originating 
in the wants, desires, aspirations of free self- 
governing citizens, grow up spontaneously, and 
maintain themselves within, but independent 



ORGANIZATION. 



33 



of, the State, so many imperia in Imperio. 
Hardly any day's newspaper but has a report 
of the proceedings of some Temperance, Odd 
Fellows, Woman's Rights, Free Trade, Meth- 
odist, Baptist, or other Sectarian meeting, 
Benevolent, Artistic, or Scientific society, — 
all private organizations, started for the pur- 
pose of cultivating and propagating, each one 
certain special principles and practices, each 
one nourishing some tissue of our manifold 
life, and all therefore contributing more or less 
to the general weal These many and diverse 
voluntary organizations contain the essence 
of political self-direction : they are the healthy 
offspring of free spirit and free life : they tem- 
per the hardening forms of legislative rule : 
they lie beneath constitutions, and upheave 
them with their spiritual force. Besides these 
there are countless industrial combinations for 
furthering especial objects of capital or labor. 
All, whatever their aim or amplitude, are so 
many nests of self-government, forestalling 
much of the work of public political authority, 
and are at once the evidence of, and a school 
for, self-direction and practical self-culture, a 
result and a support of manly life and polit- 
ical freedom. 

3 



34 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

The further you go east the fewer there are 
of these voluntary public-spirited associations. 
England, next to ourselves, has the most of 
them. In France, under the shallow despot, 
Louis Napoleon, they were not allowed to be, 
while they are springing up in Italy and Spain 
and Germany, since these nations have begun 
their regeneration. 



VI. 

WORK. 

We live by work ; we prosper by work ; we 
rise by work. Men take rank according to the 
work they do. Luther and Shakespeare are 
ruling sovereigns among men by virtue of the 
vastness and excellence of their work. All 
history, all civilization, is the product of work. 
We advance by its inventions, we thrive on its 
accumulations. Intellect is the parent of work ; 
the more method there is in work, the more ef- 
fective it is. The simplest garden is laid out 
in beds ; if you sow squash, and peas, and 
beets, and celery, and Brussels sprouts, all to- 
gether, you will have a horticultural chaos and 
no vegetables. Foresight, intelligence in work, 
are the guage of progress. Mankind rests on 
work, moves on work ; stop work, and New 
York, London, Berlin, collapse. London, New 
York, Berlin, are great workshops. 

Walk through the thoroughfares of these 
workshops, to learn what wealth they turn out 
daily, then pass into other quarters, into dark, 



$6 BRIEF ESSA YS. 

damp, crowded cellars, and hungry attics, and 
reeking tenement-houses, to learn how squalor 
and poverty cling to the sides of wealth and 
luxury, like a " mildewed ear blasting its whole- 
some brother." A busy city may be likened to 
a huge monster, its upper members glittering 
in gold and diamonds, while its lower are bound 
with rags oozing with festered sores. And is 
not he a social monster, the single individual 
who, with a million in his pocket, walks through 
a crowd of the half-clad and the half-fed ? or 
are not they the monsters, beings unnatural, by 
the side of comfortable opulence, prodigies in 
the face of healthy Nature ? 

Can this yawning chasm be filled ? The 
pale, stooping woman in that bare, chill gar- 
ret, stitching from daybreak till midnight to 
earn poor clothes and poorer meals, can she be 
brought near to that other woman in jewels and 
laces, who in cushioned coach is rolling to the 
fashionable ball, striving to turn night into day 
in search of amusement ? They are both of 
American birth, possibly cousins, and both are 
immortal souls. Both, in different forms, are 
victims of conditions whose cold, pitiless arbi- 
trariness may, within a decade, banish the 
daughter of the bejewelled one to the garret 



WORK. 37 

of the overworked and underfed. What polit- 
ical economist, with his formulas and super- 
ficial expedients, dares confront the vast lower- 
ing problem of capital and labor ? Political 
economy deals with producers and consumers, 
not with throbbing men. Until you deal with 
men primarily as men, you will solve no such 
problems. 

Individual men, and aggregates of men in 
communities and nations, are set in motion by, 
are agitated by, nay, have their very being in, 
feeling. Feeling propels the intellect, which is 
but its tool ; feeling is the father of all wants, 
originates all work. The needs of conjoined 
beings, co-working for mutual help, these create 
society, gradually promoting it, according to the 
power and purity of feeling, from savagery 
through barbarism up to the highest levels yet 
attained in the more advanced communities 
of the most civilized nations. In the best 
of these, even in foremost personages, there 
is nevertheless but partial play given to the 
feelings. Hence discontents, restlessness, vice, 
unhappiness, despondency ; and in those out- 
wardly and personally less favored, misery, de- 
spair, crime. Free play, not to say full play, to 
the deep, infinitely varied, ceaseless motions of 



38 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

the feelings, those regents of life, those con- 
stituents of the substance of human being, free 
play to these demands a far closer mental asso- 
ciation among men than has yet taken place. 
As human relations now are, each one does, 
comparatively with what he might do, little for 
himself, because he does and can do so little for 
others ; it is an everlasting principle that the 
more we do for others the more we do for our- 
selves. 

Men in all positions stand in too hostile at- 
titudes one towards another. Every man is 
trying to get the better of somebody. There is 
far too much counter-working and not enough 
co-working. The stronger and shrewder make 
the many work for the few — the few growing 
rich, the many keeping poor. The problem of 
wages, the relations between buyer and seller, 
between producer and consumer, the reciprocal 
rights of capitalist and laborer, beneath all 
these problems, within them, above them, lie the 
rights of man, not rights political, but those 
rights which grow out of, inhere in, his organic 
nature. Now the faculties, powers, impulses, 
aspirations which, because they involve these 
rights, constitute the human being, these carry 
within them laws implanted there to solve all 



work. 39 

such problems, — laws, obscure it may be, dif- 
ficult to discover, as laws of large comprehen- 
siveness are apt to be. Electricity played round 
and through the air and earth in the days of 
Socrates and Cicero ; and how many centuries 
had mankind to wait for the Franklin and the 
Morse to seize its law, and turn it to great 
uses ? A deep law, covering a wide field of 
being or action, is ever freighted with impor- 
tant and with beneficent solutions. 

Of deep, fruitful, social laws, Fourier pro- 
fesses to be the discoverer. I am not aware 
that any other social reformer and thinker puts 
forward a like pretension. At the same time 
without some such discovery — discovery of 
synthetic, far-stretching law — no solution of 
social and industrial problems can be reached. 
Is Fourier a discoverer? In recent discus- 
sions the name of Fourier occasionally comes 
up ; in most cases to be briefly dismissed as 
that of a communist, free lovist, at best an im- 
practical dreamer. Fourier is nothing of all 
this, be he a genuine discoverer or not. Of 
a thoughtful and conscientious nature, by the 
frauds he witnessed, and was obliged to be a 
party to, in trade, he was, as a young man, 
driven to meditate on the means of introducing 
justice into the dealings among men ; and the 



40 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

result, after years of observation and study, 
was, that by higher methods work may be made 
more thorough, more productive, and, instead 
of being in most cases irksome, and in many 
repulsive, be attractive and enjoyable. 

See that shoemaker, bent over his last all 
day, and that tailor, plying the needle eight or 
ten hours daily, each bound to his one task 
from week to week, from year to year, through 
a long work-weary life ? Such in its monotony 
and irksomeness, is the life of the tens of mil- 
lions of workers. Those two stout intelligent 
young men are capable of several kinds of work, 
and how willingly would each shift his hands, 
some hours every day, from the one endless 
routine to other production. There is not a 
sound man but is capable of more than one 
kind of work, many men are capable of several 
kinds, and some of many kinds. Figure to 
yourself a thousand people living in conven- 
ient proximity — not the close and foul prox- 
imity of the tenement-house — so ordering a 
dozen different forms of work that they could 
in parties of ten or twenty alternate every two 
or three hours, each choosing departments 
for which he has aptitude or liking. Here, 
besides the enlivening changes, they have 
the exhilaration of congenial companionship. 



WORK. 41 

Add to this that in most kinds of work, men, 
women, and children are united in cheerful 
rivalry, and does not the attractiveness and 
joyousness of such work shine upon you ? It 
is only higher organization, profounder method 
applied to work, whereby to satisfy, as they 
never have been satisfied, the wants of the 
human being. In this there is nothing de- 
structive, nothing subversive. It is a change 
similar to that which a man makes when he 
sells his house, puts the proceeds into a joint- 
stock company, and betakes him to a board- 
ing-house, similar, but far more serviceable. 
It will be an expansion, a liberation of the 
worker, a change which will be justified, nay, 
it is demanded, by the whole diversified capa- 
bility of man ; is invigorating to his intellect 
as it will be purifying to his heart. 

Let the thoughtful, sympathetic men, whose 
minds are now busy with the momentous ques- 
tions of poverty and crime, of wages and com- 
petition, of cooperation and labor, let them 
give an intelligent and a dispassionate exam- 
ination to the pretensions of Fourier as a dis- 
coverer of social and industrial laws. Latent 
in humanity there are such laws ; bring them 
to light, and the way is opened to great solu- 
tions.' 



VII. 

THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 

At Guise, a small town in the northeastern 
part of France, on the Oise, half-way between 
Paris and Brussels, has arisen an industrial 
and social phenomenon, in the shape of a 
human hive of busy, well-housed, well-fed men, 
women, and children, literally a Social Palace. 
Above the destitutions and squalors and star- 
vations of the laboring masses of Christendom, 
this pile rears itself like an illuminated dome 
lighting up the dim domains of an unhealthy 
dream-land. But the buildings and business 
of this pile are the opposite of dream-like ; 
they are the logical outcome of generations of 
healthy aspiring effort, the legitimate offspring 
of centuries of deep gestation. They stand 
there now a great new fact, smiling with a 
noble pride, glistening with hope to the civil- 
ized world. But what is the Social Palace at 
Guise ? 

In the first quarter of the present century, 
into the mind of a French boy, while seated 



THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 43 

on the benches of a crowded, misused school, 
came the wish to better its conditions. Soon 
this thoughtful sympathy was transferred from 
his school-fellows to mechanical laborers ; and 
between the ages of eleven and twelve he set 
himself earnestly to work in his father's iron 
work-shop, that he might get command of a 
wide field for usefulness. As he grew towards 
manhood the injustices, oppressions, hardships, 
which press upon the toiling masses wrought 
on him more deeply, and set him to devising 
plans for their remedy. Intelligent, zealous, 
punctual, young Godin was early able to start 
for himself, and to prosper. The capital ac- 
quired by his foresight and industry he used 
to fulfill the broad, generous desires of his 
opening years ; from his own high, pecuniary 
vantage-ground he sought to bring more jus- 
tice into the relations between labor and capi- 
tal, and bringing more justice, to bring greater 
profit to both. His is one of those clear, sym- 
pathetic natures that will not let the man 
forget the great dreams of the youth. 

Studying in search of the best method to 
compass his noble wish ; examining the vari- 
ous plans projected for associating on deeper 
principles the workman and his employer, 



44 BRIEF ESSAYS, 

M. Godin accepted the deductions of Fou- 
rier's great synthetic mind. His own mind is 
of the same " large composition " as Fourier's 
■ — one of those rare organizations which com- 
bine high, strong, forecasting intellect with 
the bountiful sensibilities which, besides mak- 
ing the intellect penetrative, send the man out 
of himself to accomplish his dearest wishes. 

The sound principle, that workmen should 
receive a justly proportioned share in the net 
produce of their work, this did not satisfy M. 
Godin. His plan embraced, in addition, the 
intellectual and social improvement of them 
and theirs through a unitary building. So 
soon as he had gathered capital enough he col- 
lected all his workmen and their families under 
one roof, or rather, under three roofs, a cen- 
tral building and two large wings, all connected 
together, each one of the three four stories 
high, with a court in the centre of each, and 
galleries running round the interior of the 
court. Near to these are separate buildings 
for nurseries, school-rooms, restaurant, mar- 
kets, bakery, etc. ; and further off are the 
various structures for the manufacture of 
stoves, this being the business of M. Godin. 

Economy, convenience, cleanliness, health- 



THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 45 

fulness, cheerfulness, these are the primary 
gains of the unitary building. In the bulky 
volume of M. Godin, published in 1871, en- 
titled "Solutions Sociales," wherein he ex- 
pounds his whole theory and aims and practice, 
the final chapter is devoted to the Social Pal- 
ace he has established at Guise. This chapter 
has forty-four sections. Space fails us here 
to illustrate the many and various advantages 
of such a palatial home ; but from the titles 
of some of these sections the reader can judge 
of their contents and import : " Character of 
the Social Abode ; Peculiarities of Architectu- 
ral Unity ; Facility of Relations ; Domestic 
Economy ; Ventilation and General Salubrity ; 
Temperature and Heating; Absence of In- 
sects ; Water and Baths ; Light, the Symbol 
of Progress ; Light in the Day ; Light at 
Night ; Order and Tranquillity ; Personal Se- 
curity ; Medical Attendance ; Integral Educa- 
tion ; Nurseries ; Schools ; Principles of Or- 
ganization ; Order and Liberty." 

In the three connected buildings, called by 
their wise founder the Familisthe, are lodged 
nine hundred people. Out of their share of 
the profits from the manufactory, food, lodg- 
ing, and clothing are paid for, all to be had 



46 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

at wholesale prices, and of good quality. Their 
general interests are under the charge of a 
council of twenty-four, twelve of either sex, 
chosen by the whole body of adult inmates. 
Out of the common fund their children, from 
infancy to youth, are educated as they can be 
nowhere else, all the nurses as well as the 
teachers in the ascending classes, holding 
their places through their attraction to those 
places. 

This is a great step from wages and the 
isolated household ; and it is the initiatory 
movement to a higher step, which will be 
taken when work shall be organized under a 
yet deeper and broader principle, divulged by 
Fourier through his discovery of the law of 
groups and series. Work will then be brought 
within the scope of the prolific, beneficent 
sway of attraction, and of affectional sympa- 
thies. Work is the regent of all human rela- 
tions ; work has raised us from barbarism to 
civilization ; every achievement is begotten, 
every joy enlivened, every liberty won, every 
virtue perfected by work. When in its many, its 
infinite modifications, work through thorough 
intellectual and affective cooperation, shall have 
become grateful, aye, and delightful, then will 



THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 47 

the sunshine of life tingle in all the countless 
hearts that now throb in the shadow of poverty, 
or beat heavily under the gloom of vice. In 
work made attractive, there is salvation, moral 
as well as industrial salvation. Have, therefore, 
no fear for morals. With increased well-being 
and cleanliness, with the independence and free- 
dom gained through steady, willing occupation, 
is engendered a more solid self-respect, a deeper 
sense of personal responsibility, and thence a 
healthier moral tone. A sparkle there will be 
of mental as well as of bodily health unknown 
elsewhere. To life will be imparted a fresh mo- 
mentum and cheerfulness, and unprecedented 
liveliness and honesty. A thousand people of 
all ages and both sexes, held together by joyful 
co-work — and nothing else could hold them — 
cannot but be sound, and the more and more 
sound according as greater play be given to all 
their faculties of intellect and feeling through 
varied occupation. Put the same thousand into 
the same building to live in idleness, unknit 
together by active co-working, and they would 
fly asunder in less than a year, scattered and 
shattered by discords and sensuality. When 
we see the effects of passions seduced and per- 
verted, as they are now so often seen, we ex- 



48 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

claim with awe, " How fearfully we are made ! " 
When we shall see them all healthily active, we 
shall exclaim with ecstacy, "How beautifully, 
how divinely we are made ! " 

Already in M. Godin's establishment the 
moral tone is much raised above what prevails 
among the same class of workmen out of the 
Familisthe, If it is still far from the highest, 
this is because, through the limitation of the 
faculties to one or two employments, freedom is 
limited. Moral perception grows clearer and 
clearer through more and more freedom. Free- 
dom grows through the unfolding and culture 
of all the faculties, those of feeling as well as 
those of intellect ; and this full unfolding and 
culture can only take place through intimate, 
variegated co-working of age, manhood, woman- 
hood, youth, and childhood. 



VIII. 

WORLDLINESS. 

That the world should be full of worldliness 
seems as right as that a stream should be full 
of water, or a living body of blood. So should 
a healthy mind be full of religion ; yet, for a 
thousand years a religious man meant the in- 
mate of a monastery, and means so now where 
monkery still glooms. The first equivalent 
your French dictionary will give you for the 
noun religieux is friar. 

A worldling is not a man filled with the 
deeper, cleaner realities, delighting in what is 
highest and best in God's world ; he is not a 
freeman of Nature's guild, but of man's ; and 
thence so laden is he with the begilt and the 
temporary, that he has little strength for the 
solid and the eternal. 

Within the majestic evolution of power and 
beauty, the incessant corruscation of God's 
world, before the eyes of man, — in the midst 
of this boundless, infinite, untangled interlace- 
ment of wheeling, illumined circles, there 
4 



SO BRIEF ESSAYS. 

moves another world, dependent on, subordi- 
nate to, this primal mighty one, and sometimes 
obstructive of it ; this is man's world, which, 
from a twig, has grown to be a far-spreading 
forest, so umbrageous at times that it is often 
a darkening screen between man's vision and 
the superior creation whence its life is drawn. 
From crude impulses, from few simple desires, 
has come, through the unfolding of intelligence, 
and the culture of feeling, a complex over- 
growth of wants and fruitions, of arts and re- 
finements, of inventions and auxiliaries, of 
discoveries and institutions, which so busy and 
concern, so flatter and engross civilized man, 
that he, their creator, has grown to be their de- 
pendent ; and, limiting his life to the round of 
their dwarfish gyrations, converting conven- 
iences into essentials, luxuries into blessings, 
things secondary into things cardinal, he in 
many cases is become such a slave to circum- 
stance, so much a creature towards his own 
creation, that he has almost ceased to feel him- 
self an issue of God. Many a man, many an 
educated man, is but dimly conscious that he is 
the inhabitant of an upper world. He knows 
of no uses but the prosaic ; the sun is his lamp, 
the summer his gardener. Like the cloth he 



WORLDLINESS. 5 1 

wears or the carriage that carries him, he is 
grown to be an artificial instead of a natural 
product. Allegiance to the divine has been 
forfeited ; he is the obsequious burgher of a 
sensuous, earthly subcreation ; he is a world- 
ling. 

In one of his weird, significant tales, Haw- 
thorne writes : " Wealth is the golden essence 
of the outward world, embodying almost every- 
thing that exists beyond the limits of the soul." 
When, therefore, we say that the worldling is 
always a mammonist, that gold is his chief 
god, we draw the widest circumference that en- 
closes his active being. His centre has not the 
heat to project the radii of life beyond material 
circumscriptions. The worldling does not live 
in his soul ; he tries to ignore his inmost self; 
his habitation is on the outskirts of beautiful 
being. Thence he has but slight relations with 
the souls of other men. Living in and on ex- 
ternalities, the superficial is the element he 
thrives in ; but, as the less food has of nutri- 
tious substance the larger must be the quan- 
tity taken, he, for his contentment, needs to be 
ever busy with the external. The internal re- 
pels him, profundities confound him ; tell him 
he is a spirit, and you sadden him. He de- 



52 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

lights in select crowds, in showy equipages, in 
fashionable dinner-parties, in the glare of chan- 
deliers. When not in " company " he is pre- 
paring for it and thinking of it. When alone, 
he has on his cordial expression only when he 
is about to go out ; the putting on of his dress- 
coat lights up his countenance. But this is 
only the modish worldling, your drawing-room 
loafer or leader, your company- man whose 
diplomas are his invitations, whose rent-roll is 
his visiting-list. Worldliness were not worth 
a paragraph in a printed page, did it not busy 
and impel brains to which those of a dressy 
metropolitan gossip were but as the fizz of 
a holiday rocket to the flash of a minie rifle. 
Erasmus was a worldling, and a higher than 
he, Bacon, much of the wisdom of whose great 
essays is worldly wisdom. Napoleon was the 
chief of worldlings, the Lucifer of this multi- 
tudinous heaven-banished crew. Herein Louis 
Napoleon is very like his uncle. The high places 
in the State, and alas ! in the Church, are apt to 
be held by worldlings, these having a simian tal- 
ent for climbing, a prehensile gift, and sinuous- 
ness in seizing and winding themselves among 
the branches of the glistening smooth-barked 
tree that has its root deep in the soil of matter, 



WORLDLINESS. 53 

and bears a bifold fruit of gold and power. But 
man can never get entirely rid of his con- 
science, nor smother utterly the inner self; 
and so, worldliness has an instinct of hypocrisy, 
and is ever seeking to wrap itself in veils and 
teguments that hide its ugliness without ham- 
pering its action ; and for this it finds often 
effectual the badges and tools of the highest 
functions, secretly hugging itself behind the 
gown judicial, the cloth clerical, and the ros- 
trum philanthropical. 

This falseness of aim, this exaggeration of 
the transient and the artificial, this deference to 
wealth and contempt of material poverty, this 
all for having and naught for being, this rest- 
less shallow activity, to which truly belong the 
words Burke untruly applied to all human ef- 
fort, " What shadows we are, what shadows we 
pursue ! " this unhealthiness of desire, this futile 
turning of the means into the end, all this, 
which is but a many-sided sign of the one hollow- 
ness, this protean worldliness, confining itself 
to no class or condition, taints members of all, 
from the king to the beggar, but dyes with its 
most gaudy stains that class in which gold most 
ministers to superfluity, the class which it at- 
tires as its choice victim, the class thus char- 



54 BRIEF ESSAYS, 

acterized by the spiritual, intellectual F. W. 
Robertson : " If you wish to know what hol- 
lowness and heartlessness are, you must seek 
for them in the world of light, elegant, super- 
ficial fashion, where frivolity has turned the 
heart into a rock-bed of selfishness. Say what 
men will of the heartlessness of trade, it is 
nothing compared with the heartlessness of 
fashion. Say what they will of the atheism of 
science, it is nothing to the atheism of that 
round of pleasure in which the heart lives ; 
dead while it lives." 



IX. 

ART. 

From the heroic combat at Thermopylae to 
the simplest individualities of doing or suffer- 
ing that give to the present hour its animation, 
every fact, event, conjunction, has its life and 
especial significance. To seize this life, in any- 
thing like its essential being and import, the 
rays shed on it from the witnessing mind must 
be well fed with vigor and sympathy. To him 
who can read them, the world is full of mean- 
ings, of hints, full of appeals. Nature is lav- 
ish of jets that issue from her glowing core, 
and await a spark from some human thought 
to flash into delightful illumination. The mind 
that is to ignite these jets must itself be warm 
with the fire of ideas. We see with ideas : he 
who has the brightest and clearest, sees best 
and farthest. 

Thus vivid, the mind builds within itself 
fabrics of thought. Out of intuitions and of 
knowledge acquired it forms images, and holds 
and carries them in its invisible grasp. This 



$6 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

mental power of interior construction is called 
imagination, and is the most intense exertion 
of intellect at its highest degree of action, ex- 
ercised most effectually in such direction as the 
predominant faculties of the individual prompt. 
To the mercantile combiner, to the military 
strategist, to the measurer of stars, imagina- 
tion, or the power of mental construction, is as 
needful as to the poet. The astronomer too, 
and the strategist must, in order to do their 
work, be able to carry in the mind combina- 
tions and completed plans. The far-seeing 
masterly man of business, who brings order 
out of a chaos of affairs, partakes with the poet 
of the creative power. The difference between 
them is, that the Poet or Artist always makes 
appeal to the feelings. So do the melodramat- 
ist and the prosaic novelist. But these work 
superficially, for rapid transitory effects. Not 
from a deep store of rich sensibilities are their 
materials drawn ; for, if so, in their work would 
be the foundations and promise of poetry ; nor, 
when their sensibilities are used by the imagi- 
nation in fiction, are they sublimated by the 
supreme, by what may be called the creative 
sensibility, that to the beautiful ; for that were 
the fulfillment of a poetic promise. 



ART. 57 

Poetry, Art (for Art is not Art unless it be 
poetical) is creative. The Artist is a creator, 
or he is naught ; that is, the light thrown from 
his mind upon an object or scene, whether real 
or mentally constructed, must win from that 
object or scene a new aspect, endue it with 
new life, enliven it with new meaning. Poetic 
genius vitalizes with its own spirit what it takes 
in hand, and it takes a subject in hand because 
it can so re-animate and elevate it. It is the 
power and privilege of genius to be fresh on 
trite themes, original on old ground. Genuine 
Art always spiritualizes, in its means as well as 
its end subordinating the physical to the men- 
tal, the animal to the psychical. It appeals to 
the feelings in such a way as not superficially 
to please them or to flatter them, but in such 
a way as shall rejoice, and through that rejoic- 
ing, purify them. The crowning faculty, — 
crowning a pyramid of" abilities, — which em- 
powers the Artist to do this, is his sensibility 
to the beautiful, what may be called his glori- 
fying faculty. Hence the Artist is not a copy- 
ist, a sensuous imitator of Nature, a mere re- 
flector ; his brain is not a daguerreotype plate 
to be painted on by the sun's rays. He is his 
own sun, and prints on an object fresh lines 



5 8 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

that make it a new picture. By experience, by- 
contemplation of Nature, his susceptive mind 
is, to be sure, ever enriched. As Wordsworth 
says : — 

" From Nature and her overflowing soul 
I had received so much that all my thoughts 
Were steeped in feeling." 

That he be so enriched the wealth of his aesthetic 
endowment must be refined by his delight in 
the beautiful. Within him there throbs more 
feeling than he needs for his every day individ- 
ual use, and the superflux he throws out in 
products having in them so much that they 
live for generations, imparting life to others, 
like the sun who from his abounding bosom 
projects warm globes to animate space. 

Under poetic impulse the Artist throws him 
out of and above his common self up to a purer, 
freer plane, where his vision is so penetrative, 
so elective, as to bring before him what is most 
choice. Life is full of wonders, is all wonder ; 
and it is the Artist's privilege to be in closer 
rapport with the divine essence out of which 
springs this manifold wonder ; and thence, be- 
come originative, he breathes into his work 
some of the breath from the creative spirit. 
To the grand and mysterious and beautiful in 



ART. 59 

Nature his soul gives a livelier echo, and thus 
is he able to make his work, as Goethe says, 
" seem at once natural and supernatural." The 
only faithful reporter and interpreter of Nature 
is the poetic reporter. No object, whether in 
Nature, or feigned in harmony therewith by 
the imagination, can be fully, distinctly seen, 
except by the light that flares higher and 
brighter in him than in others, the light of the 
beautiful. Not the most gifted can reproduce 
the whole, can reveal the full secret ; the genial 
hand can tell enough to give stimulating inti- 
mations, visionary glimpses of much that is 
untold. Yet in itself a work of Art should 
not be vague or indecisive ; a finite whole in 
one sense, it so speaks to the soul as to let 
us feel that it comes out of the Infinite, and 
it points us thither 

Art, then, is a projection out of the inmost 
of gifted, poetic-minded men. Its source is 
given, quite unsconsciously, in a few lines of 
Raphael's letter to his friend, Count Baldas- 
sare Castiglione : " As to the Galatea," he 
writes, " I should hold myself to be a great 
Master were only half of the great things in 
it that your excellency writes to me. In your 
words, however, I find proof of the love you 



60 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

bear me. Let me here say to you that, in 
order to paint a beautiful female figure, I 
should have to see many, and, moreover, under 
the condition that your excellency stood near 
me, to choose the most beautiful. But as a right 
judgment is as rare as is a beautiful woman, 
/ make use of a certain idea which springs up in 
my mind. Whether or not this possesses ar- 
tistic excellence I know not, but I strive to com- 
pass it!' The brains of Raphaels and Leo- 
nardos and Phidiases, these are the nests, high 
and lonely like the eagle's, overlooking the 
plains below, whence issues winged Art. A 
visionary realm is that of Art, too ethereal to 
be but partially incarnated ; and this is its 
source, — a longing for, an inward mounting 
towards, perfection, a striving after beautiful 
possibilities. Art is an iris-hued transfigura- 
tion of plodding prosaic life, a rainbow everlast- 
ingly spanning the storm-drenched world. 



X. 

TRAVEL. 

Would you make the most of a capable 
youth ? Drive him away from home, even 
should his home be a vast metropolis, a London, 
a Paris, a New York. If he never quits it he 
gets withered and localized into a cockney or a 
badaud. A youth of mental force, especially 
one with the boldness of genius, will not wait 
to be driven. Travel is a lively educator ; it 
opens, it expands, it liberates the mind. Ob- 
serve those citizens — of the better class so- 
called — who never go beyond their county or 
state ; they get to be so self-complacent about 
petty home-possessions, so intellectually (and 
unconsciously) emaciated, from ever breathing 
the same close mental air, so redolent of pro- 
vincial egotism, that the sole self-defense their 
friends have is to laugh outright at such child- 
ish limitation. 

When a competent man travels, he goes out 
of himself, he projects him beyond the narrow 
circle of home-activities and customary influ- 



62 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

ences ; his faculties by being freed, are strength- 
ened. To go out of one's self, to forget one's 
self, is morally the most gainful movement that 
can be made. Akin to this is the intellectual 
liberation by travel, which, like the moral, is 
often rich in wide-spread benefit. Had Shake- 
speare not travelled up to London, what would 
have become of us ? We should have had no 
Lear, no Tempest, no Hamlet, no Imogen. 
Stratford-on-Avon, with neighboring Warwick, 
could not have fed the brain out of which were 
to spring these wonders and giants. Much 
of circumstance genius can overcome ; such 
conquest is one of its functions ; but it must 
have room for the free play of its sprightly 
brood. Who will pretend that if Raphael had 
been born and bred in picture-banning Con- 
stantinople, the world would have been replen- 
ished with his Madonnas ? Goethe was im- 
pelled to travel away from prosaic Frankfort, 
and his long life in genial Weimar he freshened 
and indoctrinated by travel into France, into 
Switzerland, into Italy. The best thing that 
Franklin ever did for himself was to run away 
from Boston when a boy. A new city with 
new influences wrought freshly on his self- 
reliance and resources, and unfolded his mental 



TRAVEL. 63 

means more decisively. His remarkable indi- 
viduality he brought with him from his birth- 
place, but its full development was due to his 
abode in Philadelphia. Travel to England com- 
pleted Franklin's early self-education. 

One of Milton's biographers, Sir Egerton 
Brydges, a genial tory, thinks that Milton's 
journey to Italy in his twenty-ninth year was 
"the preservative of Milton's poetical genius 
against his political adoptions." Certain it is, 
that what he saw and heard and learnt and felt 
in Italy, was a phasis in his culture which 
nothing else could have supplied. This journey 
Milton shortened, being ashamed, as he says, 
to remain abroad enjoying himself, while his 
countrymen were fighting for freedom at home. 
For twenty years politics withdrew him from 
poetry. When he returned from Italy Milton 
was thirty-one. Dante was thirty-six when 
banished from Florence. Had he been re- 
called after a year or two, he would, with his 
fiery temperament, have thrown himself again 
upon the sea of Italian politics at that stormy 
period, and the calm, abstracted moods, needed 
for high poetry, would not have been found. 
To Dante's enforced travel for the last twenty 
years of his life the world probably owes one 
of the great epics of literature. 



64 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

Of single journeys the most momentous 
was that of Luther to Rome. In after life he 
declared, " I would not for a hundred thousand 
florins not have seen Rome, not have seen 
Rome, not have seen Rome. I should have 
been troubled for fear that I did the Pope in- 
justice." The opening of such eyes on what 
they saw in Rome, and on the way thither, was 
an effect of travel which in turn became a cause 
as potent and prolific as any that human in- 
sight can trace. 

A restless yearning often drives men of 
creative power abroad to enlarge themselves, to 
feast their hungry faculties on variety. Homer 
and Plato and Pythagoras were great travel- 
lers. ^Eschylus did part of his travel as a sol- 
dier, and won the crown of preeminent bravery 
at Marathon and again at Salamis. Socrates 
went on three military expeditions, two of 
them into remote Thrace. Demosthenes liked 
travel ; so did Cicero and Virgil and Horace. 
Nor should we forget the saints, Augustin and 
Jerome and Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas. 
To Montaigne and Cervantes travel was a 
harvest ; and so it was to Montesquieu, Voltaire, 
Rousseau, to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, 
Shelley. 



TRAVEL. 65 

The most majestic and far-seeing of travellers 
was Columbus. He travelled in search of a 
World and found it. Three centuries later, 
while yet the natives roamed on the hither side 
of the Alleghanies, there grew up in this new 
world a boy, who, taking on himself at the 
age of sixteen the engagements of manhood, 
started on his travels, an authorized surveyor, 
towards the wilds of the Shenandoah and the 
mountains beyond, training his courageous eye 
among untamed Indians, inuring his heroic 
limbs to toil and storm, thus unconsciously 
educating himself for the great journey he was, 
in mature manhood, to make from Cambridge 
in Massachusetts to Yorktown in Virginia ; a 
journey which lasted about six years, and the 
fruits whereof may be judged by this, that 
in one hundred years from the day he started 
on that journey in 1776, the three millions 
of colonists whose national independence was 
secured by the capture of Cornwallis at York- 
town, will have grown to be a Republic of 
more than forty millions of souls, the most 
prosperous and most progressive nation, the 
most enlightened and most influential on the 
globe. A few years after the capture of Corn- 
wallis, the first President of the new republic 
5 



66 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

granted at Philadelphia an audience to a young 
French traveller, then unknown, Chateaubriand, 
who, in his memoirs written half a century 
later, thus records the interview : " Happy am 
I that the looks of Washington fell on me. 
I felt myself warmed by them for the rest of 
my life." 

Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon were terrible 
travellers. With such retinue did they move, 
that not only were they secure against being 
robbed, but were strong enough to rob and 
sack at any of the stations of their numerous 
journeys. But to humanity even more event- 
ful than these, are another class, who may 
be called travellers paramount, namely Tribes, 
Hordes, Peoples. Under a sway resistless, and 
deeper than any conscious impulse, do they 
stretch forward on their long endless journey- 
ings. Think of the first wave which, far back 
in the dim dawn of time, started westward, 
rolling on, we know not how far and how 
fast, pushed forward by stronger waves, and 
these again urged onward by still stronger, 
until, out of the vast, mysterious Asiatic womb, 
the whole of Europe was peopled even to its 
westwardmost islands. Think of those huge 
tidal waves, irresistible, overwhelming, which, 



TRAVEL. 67 

under the names of Goths, Suevi, Lombards, 
Burgundians, Vandals, swept over the Roman 
Empire in the early centuries of our era, over- 
laying an exhausted population with fresh de- 
posits of human breeds, wherefrom were to 
spring the modern nations of Europe, out of 
barbarian grossness emerging self-crowned with 
Literature and Art, and finally with the great- 
est of civilizers, Science. 

Onward, still onward they again rolled, in 
the tempestuous track of the bold God-driven 
Columbus. And now, while this new World 
is yet but sparsely peopled, already have the 
stoutest of them pushed across our wide conti- 
nent, and are heaping themselves up on its 
western shore, preparing to roll still westward 
on the long, broad paths of the Pacific. 

Seeing what we have seen, and knowing on 
stronger authority than that of Bishop Berke- 
ley, that 

" Westward the course of Empire takes its way," 

were it a mere egotistic imagination, an ethno- 
graphical impertinence, to foresee that at no 
very remote time the descendants of those 
teeming bands of stout adventurous travellers 
who, a dozen centuries ago, in spite of Roman 
Emperors and Roman Legions, took possession 



68 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

of Europe, coming out of Asia, will take pos- 
session of Asia, coming out of America ? Sav- 
ages, they went out of Asia ; they will enter 
it, men of the same force, armed with all the 
thousandfold might of science and invention. 
A race ahead of all other races in knowledge 
and mental power, and yet itself but partially 
unfolded, and in the full swing of eager prog- 
ress, will meet on the populous shores of East- 
ern Asia, a people aged, stagnant, a completed 
people, a people that has long since run the 
range of its innate capacities, a people that has 
never travelled. The stronger a race is, the 
wider its travel. 

What if we imagine the later waves of 
population, which, starting from the western 
slopes of the Himalayas, flooded, to fertilize, 
first Western Asia, then Eastern Europe, then 
Western Europe, then America, on their march 
displacing, or absorbing into their stronger 
blood less capacious breeds — what if we ima- 
gine them to have come full circle in their toil- 
some travel round the temperate zone of the 
globe, surging in triumphant splendor in the 
heart of ample Asia, brandishing, not the sword 
of war, but a far more potent instrument of 
conquest, the torch of Science, blazing with 



TRAVEL. 69 

clear, accumulated, thoughtful might, illumi- 
nating domains at present undreamed of? 
What if we imagine this buoyant multitude, 
loaded with the mental spoils of thousands of 
years, starting again, to plant through Western 
Asia and Eastern Europe the benefactions of 
Science and Art and Culture, and the blessings 
that stream from the general usufruct of broad 
principles and intelligent submission to divine 
law, repeating, under far higher conditions, 
its westward travel, sowing everywhere, along 
its broadened furrow, truth and beauty and 
power ? 



XI. 

OBEDIENCE. 

Moving to the rhythm of law, the life that 
throbs from the mighty central soul gladdens 
with its pulse all the arteries of the Universe, 
forgetting never the finest capillaries of being. 
Of this animation the most sparkling result 
looks through the eyes of man. Within his 
wonderful self a man carries a triple life, each 
a boundless power, an unfathomable source, — 
his sensational or animal, what might be termed 
his fleshly life, his moral, spiritual, or passional 
life, which supplies the fuel and motive force to 
his being, and finally the life intellectual, whose 
office is that of the ships rudder, to hold the 
combined lives to their natural or chosen 
courses. In this high function intellect is 
aided by instinct, which is a wise and innate, 
though unconscious, power of self-direction. 
But against the centrifugal forces within a man 
the two together, instinct and intellect, suffice 
not at times to keep his being in its natural 
orbit. The hardest to enlighten is selfishness. 



OBEDIENCE. J I 

Through the earlier phases of general human 
development, man delights in a youthful willful- 
ness, a contradictory lawlessness, a partial self- 
destructive indulgence. 

Among the later discoveries man makes 
is, that his well-being depends on obedience to 
law, and that the laws he is to obey are not 
usurping tyrannies, not even self-imposed re- 
strictions, but movements of growth, impulses 
of healthy life, which invite kindly guidance 
in order to work as cooperative activities, — 
healthy vivacities, that only need sympathetic 
assistance and furtherance. Nature is as me- 
thodical and orderly as she is generous, and her 
generosity is only available to those who per- 
ceive and accept her method and her order. 

What if you were to set yourself to quench 
the life of outward Nature, to arrest the rising 
grass in spring, to stay the cataract's leap, to 
cool the ripening rays of July : the very thought 
of such efforts savors of lunacy. Yet this is 
what every one now does daily, in greater or 
less degree. When, in eating or drinking, in 
overwork or underwork, asleep or awake, ac- 
tively or passively, you break a law of Nature, 
you quench some of her life, and you quench 
it there where only it can be quenched, tern- 



72 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

porarily, partially, personally. You throw your- 
self out of the wardship of that beneficent 
wisdom which makes itself your sleepless, 
almost omnipotent, guardian and servant. And 
yet, such is the all-pervasive force of Nature, 
her inaccessible vitality, her irreducible might, 
and such our dependence upon her, our in- 
dissoluble ties to her, that with our worst law- 
lessness and willfulness we can but partially 
forfeit her protection. By resisting her de- 
mands, bodies, forms, are maimed or vitiated 
or destroyed, but the life that holds them in 
shape is inexpugnable. At the acme of will- 
fulness, in the extreme darkness of desperation, 
a man commits suicide : his purpose is, to put 
an end to himself. He cannot do it : Nature's 
resource is too deep for his shallow strokes : 
she baffles him. The life that asserted itself 
by temporarily animating his organized body is 
inextinguishable, and keeps its hold for another 
phase of being. To his surprise, and at first to 
his dismay, he finds himself still alive : he 
has killed his body, his soul he cannot kill. 
Through his imperishable consciousness, he 
finds himself not only alive but retarded, ob- 
structed by another, a crowning, breach of law. 



XII. 

FREEDOM. 

There are who affirm, and try to believe, 
that indulgence of every impulse were enjoy- 
ment of freedom. When from present example 
and from history it is proved to them that such 
indulgence is ever followed by pain, penance, 
enslavement, death, then they exclaim that man 
has no freedom of will. 

One-sided indulgence is license, not liberty. 
Is a man free to strike his neighbor because he 
is angry with him ? Desire is not free will, it 
is not even will. To go whither impulse drives 
is to be the toy of desire or its victim. This is 
to be willful as children are. Every child, every 
man, has a will, many wills ; but no children 
and few men, very few, have much freedom of 
will, which high condition is only then attained 
when there is coincidence between human and 
divine will, a condition only attainable through 
the full, harmonious activity of all of man's 
powers, and partially attainable through the 
habitual easy empire of the high moral powers 



74 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

\ 

over his wants and conduct Only with com- 
pleted human development can there be perfect 
freedom of will. A man's liberty is exactly in 
proportion to the degree of his unfolding. The 
chief men of Timbuctoo are immeasurably less 
free than the chief men of London. With hu- 
man power in this broad sense human liberty 
ever grows. 

The ancient destiny was the Greek concep- 
tion of overruling law, checking, baffling, con- 
trolling human effort. But the Greek spiritual 
nature was not enough developed to conceive 
of this Divine law in its full beneficence and 
absolute justice. Hence the Greeks, and like 
them many moderns, nominal Christians, repre- 
sent, and complain of, destiny as hard and 
cruel ; which complaint is always an animal 
howl, or an egotistic agony. 

Men in whom robust intellect, and strong 
animal or self-seeking passions are combined 
with what is called an iron will, have even less 
freedom of will than many who are intellect- 
ually and actively their inferiors. With the 
world such men often succeed in their aims ; 
but if so, what they do is afterwards undone ; 
for unfailingly as the physical law of light, the 
moral law asserts, sooner or later, its absolute, 



FREEDOM. . 75 

inevitable dominion. Force of will, thus com- 
bined, succeeds, at times largely, against men, 
never against God. Napoleon was the most 
godless man of his age. But mostly these bold, 
bad men, who never even near the condition of 
. freemen, fail in their life-time, and die miserable 
and powerless, or gnaw their lives out on some 
St. Helena, or stalk about among their fellows 
under a ban, the harmless ghosts of their for- 
mer selves, pointed at, but not heeded or 
heard. 

To be unbound is no more to be free than 
to be strong in will and intellect is to be free. 
To be let loose is not only not to be enfran- 
chised, it may be a step towards a wider dis- 
franchisement. Within close tubes which carry 
their precious charge safe and unwasted to the 
minutest arterial ramifications, is confined the 
living blood. Make a breach in one of the tubes, 
and life flows away in the liberated current. A 
type is this of all being. Being, to be adequate, 
must be contained. The universe of being is a 
vast organic whole, one mighty combined unit 
made up of countless single units ; and that 
the one whole abide in harmonious combina- 
tion, and that each constituent enjoy its indi- 
vidual essential being, each must be withheld 



*j6 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

from infringing on its neighbors, must keep to 
its special path. Each is endowed with apti- 
tudes, capacities, aspirations, the working of 
which constitutes its life. By misapplying 
these aptitudes, by balking these aspirations, 
it so far frustrates its life, and to that degree 
maims its freedom. When each is a law unto 
itself, it fulfills its end and feels itself free ; 
that is, when by inward power and by integrity 
of aim, it completely obeys the law of its being, 
and thus fully unfolds its innate virtue. To 
violate this law is so much anarchy, a step back 
towards chaos. 

To all life and movement law is a sheath of 
safety. And thence, man's best business is to 
study, discover, understand, and administer law. 
The laws which govern conscious human acts 
are moral laws, and as consciousness is the 
highest attribute of life, the laws which rule 
conduct are to man the most momentous. 
Equally with all other Divine laws they are 
inviolable. Every breach of them brings loss 
and an abridgment of freedom. Continuous 
breach of them leads to deeper and deeper 
servitude, ending in forfeiture of the privileges 
of consciousness, which forfeiture is moral 
death. What to the life of the body are the 



FREEDOM. *JJ 

arterial tubes, which from the heart unrest- 
ingly carry blood to feed every corporeal func- 
tion, such are the moral laws (issuing from his 
soul) which carry strength to the hourly con- 
duct of the man. They confine and guide all 
its motions, that these, performing healthily 
their appointed offices, may enjoy their full life 
and freedom. 

The organism of man is a hierarchy, wonder- 
fully aggregated, beautifully proportioned, ex- 
quisitely adjusted out of seemingly oppugnant 
constituents. When all of these shall perform 
each its healthy function, will ensue active and 
most productive harmony. For the perform- 
ance of its healthy function, not only does no 
one of these many and diverse constituents re- 
quire the suppression or weakening of any other 
one, but not one of them, neither the highest 
nor the lowest in the scale, can reach its full 
function without the cooperation of each and 
all of the others. At the summit of the scale, 
the regulators of human movement are the 
generic feelings, the spiritual and moral sensi- 
bilities, whose approval is the touchstone of 
conduct, whose joy is the benediction of life, 
whose full satisfaction were the triumphant 
shout of freedom. 



XIII. 

THE BRAIN. 

Men have mind in proportion to brain. The 
brain of idiots weighs from fifteen to thirty 
ounces ; the full, healthy human brain from 
forty to sixty. Mr. Davis of England, having 
a very large cranial collection, about eighteen 
hundred specimens from all quarters of the 
globe, ascertained the relative volume of brain 
of different races by filling the skulls with dry 
sand. He found that the European averaged 
92 cubic inches, the Oceanic 89, the Asiatic 
88, the African 86, the Australian 81. Meas- 
urements made by the late Dr. Morton of 
Philadelphia, who had a collection of over a 
thousand skulls, accorded in the main with 
those of Mr. Davis, and confirmed Blumen- 
bach's scale of races, the Caucasian brain 
being the largest, the Mongolian the next in 
size, then the Malay, then the American Indian, 
the Ethiopian being the smallest. 

The brain is made up of nerves and nervous 
substance ; and in proportion as to the simplest 



THE BRAIN. 79 

form of brain (a mere rudimentary ganglion) 
parts are added, mental power increases. Not 
only is there no intellect and no emotion with- 
out nerves, there is no sensation, no voluntary 
movement. Nervous fibres enfold, embrace, 
penetrate into the body and its every limb and 
tissue : only through them can the whole and 
each part show life. Consider the power of 
nerves : they give to the swift his fleetness, 
to the strong his strength ; without them no 
muscle can contract, no lung expand. These 
white threads are the conductors of force, the 
primary engines of motion, the arbiters of pain, 
the dispensers of joy. Now reflect, that of 
this most refined, most powerful material, this 
sublimated extract of matter, there are packed 
away in the scull from fifty to sixty ounces, 
from three to four pounds of a substance that 
has the highest potency among visible agents. 
To think that for centuries naturalists, physi- 
ologists, philosophers, moralists, psychologists 
have had this tremendous battery of the soul 
darting at them messages which none of them 
could read. Before their eyes ever sparkled 
this divine treasury of revelations, and none 
learnt how to prize its transcendent worth ; 
until, at the very end of the 18th century, a 



80 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

large-brained German, Gall, by one of those 
spontaneous springs of genius whereby the 
mind leaps from a fact to its law, got upon the 
track which after years of vigilant observation, 
patient, conscientious thought, led him to the 
discovery of the mighty function of this con- 
fluent, multitudinous, symmetric mass of nerv- 
ous fibres, this conglomerate constellation of 
magnetic cells — led him to the discovery that 
this great organ of the mind (using mind to 
embrace all impulsive and emotional as well 
as intellectual movement) is not one single 
organ, but a congeries of organs, each the in- 
strument of a separate mental power. 

Pascal's saying that he could not conceive of 
a man without a head, has a deep significance 
when we reflect that Nature never makes two 
heads, any more than two faces or two leaves, 
alike, and that the differences in the size and 
shape of heads are caused and controlled by 
the mysterious irresistible motion of electrified 
nervous cords. To swap heads were to swap 
beings. The man is his head, or rather, that 
which shapes his head, the vivid inspired brain 
within it. Contrast the head of Napoleon with 
that of Murat, the head of Shakespeare with 
that of George III. the head of Pope Borgia 



THE BRAIN. 8 1 

with that of Melancthon. These contrasts hint 
at the creative potency of brain nerves. Run 
a line from just above the eyebrows backwards, 
an inch above the ear, and cut off the chin 
(which no mere animal has) and you have a 
type of the head and brain of animals next 
below man. The head, thus mutilated, is un- 
human. To humanize it, instead of running 
the line horizontally from the root of the nose, 
run it vertically about three inches, and you 
have the outline of the forehead, the beaming 
forehead of man, " the front of Jove himself." 
But still, if from the top of this line you run 
another nearly at right angles to it with hardly 
any curve, you have not a man, you have a 
fearful creature with only animal propensities 
and intellect, an intellectual monster. But, 
from the top of the forehead spring an arch, 
and you have — in proportion to the height 
and width of the arch — a vaulting space 
for the play of those great cerebral organs, 
through whose instrumentality man has his 
high humanity, the organs of his broad generic 
feelings, his spiritual and moral powers. 

Through the discoveries of Gall we are now 
enabled to make these impressive and most 
significant general partitions of the brain ; but 
6 



82 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

of such partitions Gall himself had at first no 
inkling. He started with no theory. The dawn 
of his discovery was in his schooldays, when, 
beaten in learning by rote by inferior class- 
mates, he was led to observe, — urged doubt- 
less by his vexation, — that those who excelled 
in verbal memory had mostly prominent eyes. 
To couple two such facts, at so early an age, 
denoted a scientific, philosophic capacity. Ob- 
serving this coincidence at another school, and 
afterwards at the university, he conceived that 
the outward prominence was caused by the 
action of the brain. From this point the step 
was short to the conjecture, that if this were 
so there would be other similar conjunctions. 
Thus, year after year, he went on making ob- 
servations and deductions from extremes of 
cranial conformation, visiting prisons, court- 
rooms, schools, hospitals, questioning friends 
and acquaintance, even accosting strangers in 
whom he perceived any remarkable configura- 
tion. In 1796, in his thirty-ninth year, he 
gave in Vienna, where he lived as a practicing 
physician, his first course of lectures on the 
physiology of the brain. 

What is the fruit of Gall's work ? This it 
is : (and when did the thought of man produce 



THE BRAIN. 83 

fruit of higher flavor and more nourishing ?) 
that the discovery of the function of the brain 
reveals the constitution of the human mind ; 
that the disclosure of the physiology of this 
huge, crowded, convoluted pile of precious, 
most expensive, nervous material opens wide 
at last the portal to the resplendent, immense, 
mysterious, unimaginably beautiful, temple of 
Psychology. Ponder the roll of mental facul- 
ties as here presented, presented in a distribu- 
tion, before Gall not suspected or conceived of, 
which indeed could not have been imagined by 
any human intellect or combination of intel- 
lects, so proportioned is it, so logical, so pene- 
trative, so divine. Not by intuition alone could 
this order and allotment have been seized or 
even approached, but only by the insight of 
genius, working patiently and lovingly upon 
the broadest, most various, most expressive, 
most pregnant of Natures facts and phenom- 
ena. 

Through the objective method what signif- 
icant symmetry, what a philosophical evolution 
is here exhibited, which never could have been 
reached through the subjective. In intellectual 
movement what a graduated ascent from the 
individual to the generic ; from the powers 



84 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

that note the crowd of visible, tangible, phys- 
ical objects, with their properties of form, size, 
weight, color, (properties common to all and 
inseparable from each) up through the relations 
of space and time and the infinitude of per- 
sonal, historical, and scientific facts, to the 
great generalizing, combining faculties, the su- 
preme intelligences, which enable men to pro- 
vide, to organize, to forecast, to deduce, to 
classify, and which, engaged, in calm majestic 
action, to the service of the spiritual and moral 
sensibilities, with them unite to constitute the 
high Reason, that lordly, sacred gift, which em- 
powers man, in the government of himself and 
his inheritance, the earth, to coact with the 
divine Regency. 

By this objective process, observing and 
studying the brain intently, sagaciously, per- 
sistently, for years, Gall revealed likewise the 
wonderful organization and character of the 
other, and by much the larger division of the 
mind, the affective portion, that embracing the 
feelings. Here is displayed again a graduated 
ascension from the personal to the universal, 
from propensities to emotions, from the self- 
preservative to the self-expanding, from ap- 
petites and impulses, which man has in com- 



THE BRAIN. 85 

mon with animals, to the wide, deep, disinter- 
ested sensibilities which make his humanity, 
from self-seeking dispositions up to innate 
senses of justice and reverence, to joy in the 
sublime and the beautiful, to faith, hope, and 
charity. 

From the discoveries of Gall legitimate de- 
ductions are, that the brain is the instrument 
of mind ; that the brain is not a single organ, 
but a congeries of organs, the function of each 
being to manifest a primitive mental power of 
feeling or of intellect ; and that, other things 
being equal, such as health, temperament, op- 
portunity, size is the measure of power. 

Look now at the brain, or at the vaulted roof, 
which it builds for its protection, and shapes to 
its wants, that glittering crown to the upright 
majesty of man, that masterpiece of nature, 
which Gall's happy gift taught him to read with 
a vision so true as to discover its mighty func- 
tion, through that discovery laying bare the 
structure and composition of the human mind, 
its power, aims, affiliations, which mental phi- 
losophers, from Plato to Hume, had been vainly 
trying to fathom with the ever short-coming 
help of their one dim method of self-conscious- 
ness. Note first the grouping of the mental 



86 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

organs. The perceptive, the elementary, in- 
tellectual, lie together along the base of the 
frontal brain. Similarly, the elementary affec- 
tive, the organs of the domestic affections, the 
primary bonds among men, form another group 
at and near the base of the posterior brain. 
Then, between these two, along the sides and 
close together, are the energetic, pugnacious, 
and acquisitive feelings, what might be called 
the self-seeking propensities. Above this group, 
and above the domestic group, in the upper 
part of the rear of the head, come the organs 
of what may be termed the self-seeking senti- 
ments. In front of these the feelings which 
give the glow of grandeur and of beauty to the 
whole mind, expanding it as by their position 
they expand the upper head laterally ; and 
above these, in the coronal region of the brain, 
are the organs of the moral and spiritual sen- 
timents, whose high office it is to control and 
temper all the other feelings, and which, when 
associated with the broad ratiocinative powers, 
— whose organs have the highest position in 
the forehead — present the noblest type of 
manhood. 

Here then are presented the most important, 
the most significant facts f hat the boundless 



THE BRAIN. Zj 

wealth of the immeasurable domains of nature 
can furnish, facts which offer to every man a 
clear picture, a clean analysis of his mental 
structure, the like of which for validity, dis- 
tinctness, reality, was never even approached 
before, and which thus open the way to the 
solution of profoundest problems in psychical 
philosophy, — facts genuine, solid, not fancies 
honored as facts, facts purely objective, not 
" vain imaginations, " as Bacon calls them, 
drawn out of a brooding brain, but transparent 
sunlit phenomena, brought to view by a dis- 
covery which, from the revelations involved in 
it, may be called sublime, and to which the 
dark delvings of the subtlest metaphysician are 
as the tentative accents of infancy to the re- 
sounding cadences of intelligent manhood from 
the mouth of authority. 

The students and expounders of man's men- 
tal constitution, why have they not only failed 
to discern this sure source of light, but why, 
since it has been demonstrably exposed, do 
they so obstinately, so arrogantly despise it ? 
Is this from spiritual and intellectual pride, 
from an egotistic repugnance to be beholden to 
aught but their own inward expedients, from 
that false independence which stiffens them 



88 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

into defiance of the supreme will, that self- 
sufficiency of human nature, typified in the 
revolt of Satan and the fable of the fall ? 

In some metaphysical organizations there is 
scientific ineptitude, causing tyranny of the 
subjective over the objective action ; and thus, 
instead of steering their course by the blaz- 
ing lights of Heaven, they grope tremulously, 
sounding forever in the fog of consciousness. 
Some philosophers never reach so high a plane 
of philosophy as to be beyond the shadows 
cast by the vulgar vice of jealousy. Some have 
not sympathy enough with life, with its infinite, 
and infinitely beautiful motions : they work in 
the rigid harness of the understanding, and so 
talk round and round a subject and never into 
it : their analysis is too meagre, too unfur- 
nished, and so it never flowers into the bloom 
of synthesis. Some so much prefer turning on 
the axis of their own consciousness to turning 
their thought outward to the abundant glory 
and expressive glow of God's worlds, that for 
the beneficent unchanging laws of His founding 
they substitute shifting fancies and excogitated 
doctrines hardened into narrow postulates, into 
despotic dogmas, thus striving to make these, 
that is, conventional human ordinations, their 



THE BRAIN. 89 

rule of life, in place of the eternal injunctions 
of that transcendent supervisive power, the ex- 
ploring of whose plans, the discovery of whose 
designs, is the best exercise of human intellect, 
the aspiring to know whose will is the most 
healthy movement of moral activities. 



XIV. 

MATERIALISM. 

You have seen, observant reader, an old hen 
that has hatched a nest of ducklings ; and did 
you mark her cackling astonishment and alarm, 
when for the first time she happens to bring 
her brood near a pond, and the little semi- 
aquatic fledglings, with a simultaneous joyful 
rush, all take to the water ? Not from experi- 
ence do they know that water is one of their 
elements. The materialists, and those who 
would make experience our sole teacher, are 
the puzzled hen, and set up a half angry cackle 
when you and I, spiritual earthlings, betake 
us to spirit as an element native to our nature, 
wherein we move with untaught delight, im- 
pelled, too, like the ducklings, by an innate 
impulse, and one infinitely higher and richer 
than that which drives them to the pond. If 
traceable antecedents were the sole causes, the 
cause of the ducklings taking to the water was 
the hen's happening to come near the pond. 
But what had her brood been chicks instead 
of ducklings ? 



MA TERIALISM. 9 1 

A hundred bricks, set up in file, all go down 
one after the other. Is the fall of each of the 
hundred caused by the fall of each immediate 
antecedent, there being thus a hundred causes ? 
Secondarily, it is ; primarily, the fall of each 
and of the whole is caused by a mental move- 
ment, by a will directing a hand. So, every 
incident in our life is one of a series, acted 
on secondarily by an immediate antecedent, 
the primary source of the existence and con- 
dition of each incident being an intangible 
essence, a living power within us, superior to, 
predominant over, our outward acts. 

To say that we learn everything from ex- 
perience is to say that we get our all from 
circumstances, that is, from what is about us, 
which were to mistake influences for causes. 
Whence come circumstances ? What are they? 
What can they be but pure creatures of mind, 
the busy product of past marriage between 
passion and intellect ? All present existent 
circumstances must be the offspring of mind ; 
they can have no other parentage, and their 
weight and multiplicity is in proportion to, 
is utterly dependent on, the force and quality 
of mental action. Were experience our only 
teacher, mankind would have remained un- 



92 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

civilized, for civilization can only be reached 
and advancement achieved through a series of 
thoughtful efforts, interior originalities, mental 
projections beyond experience. Of Columbus 
it may be said, that he first discovered the 
Western Continent in his brain, and then veri- 
fied the discovery by experiment. The origi- 
nator, the maker of facts, can be no other than 
mind, and mind controls the observation and 
employment of those already existing. Auto- 
nomic life the mind must have, or it could not 
be : some power of self-impulsion is implied 
in its being. 

The printed words that I am reading, whence 
are they ? They come through the composi- 
tor's type-box. Where does he get them ? In 
the manuscript before him. And the words 
in the manuscript, whence are they ? From 
the mind of the writer. Every word is an 
offshoot from thought. Every deed of man 
is preceded by a thought. In the most trivial 
movement, immaterial action is the antecedent 
and producer of the material. Every result 
brought about by human contrivance and will 
is an embodied finishing whose beginning is 
a spiritual seed sown in the brain. No gross- 
est act but existed first in thought before it 



MATERIALISM. 93 

took body. Without thinking, a man would 
go without his dinner. Every act proves a 
precedent thought. This is an absolute law 
of mind. As all human acts presuppose hu- 
man thought, so superhuman acts presuppose 
superhuman thought. A man is a superhu- 
man act, and the existence of a man demon- 
strates the preexistence of God. But mate- 
rialists not being willing to entertain the idea 
of God, this exposition will not be accepted by 
minds in which, to use the language of Mr. 
Hazard in his profound work 1 on " Causation 
and Freedom in Willing," " admiration of the 
minutely perfect is much more active than 
admiration for the sublimely vast," minds not 
endowed to enjoy, and therefore to profit by, 
thoughts on the infinite and immeasurable, 
minds not open to mysterious suggestions. 

Most men, even among the highly organized, 
are defective in one direction or other. Some 
are born without, or with very weak, musical 
sensibility ; some with small faculty of reason- 
ing; others without feeling for the beautiful; 
Dr. Johnson had no sense of smell. Material- 

1 Two Letters on Causation and Freedom in Willing y ad- 
dressed to John Stuart Mill. By Rowland G. Hazard. Bos- 
ton : Lee & Shepard, 1869. 



94 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

ists are born with feeble spiritual intuition. 
They are truncated, and truncated at the top. 
They lack the higher imagination ; they know 
not the sublimity of awe. Their spiritual sen- 
ses are dull. Hence their minds are compara- 
tively superficial, and are insufficient. 

Metaphysics, having to do with the laws of 
mind and of being, must deal with the spiritual. 
Nay, spiritual intuitions, emotional suscepti- 
bilities, are the best of its substance. The 
man who cannot turn a tune, who takes no 
delight in Beethoven or Bellini, would you go 
to him for the laws and capacities of music ? 
Strictly speaking, a materialist cannot be a 
metaphysician, a mental philosopher. His can- 
not be what aesthetically is called a creative 
mind ; and to be a good mental philosopher, 
there must be a power of intuitive perception 
that is akin to the creative gift of high poetry. 
Tell him, with Epictetus, that he is a soul 
bearing about a corpse, and he will deem your 
talk foolishness. And yet, to get thoroughly 
at any movement, or even at any condition of 
being, there is but one track, and that is along 
the line of light that flashes from our own soul 
into the soul of things. By no other can the 
intellect penetrate beyond surfaces, "The only 



MATERIALISM. 95 

cause," I quote again from Mr. Hazard, " of 
which we have any idea, is the exercise of suf- 
ficient power in the effort of an intelligent 
being." 

Was the fall of an apple the cause of the 
discovery of gravitation, or only the occasion ? 
Was not the cause in the mental aptitude of 
Newton for taking a hint from nature, and for 
tracing ordinary superficial phenomena to their 
deep source ? On that same day hundreds of 
eyes saw apples fall, but only the brain of New- 
ton so seized the spectacle as to see it with 
interior vision ; he got behind the phenome- 
non. And still behind this Newtonian cause 
of the discovery of gravitation, was there not 
that supreme cause which endowed him to 
make the discovery ? In living phenomena 
and motion to see only a quality of matter, 
is to merge spirit in matter, to dethrone mind, 
and subordinate it to things. By the habit 
of doing this we grow short-sighted, defraud- 
ing ourselves, unmanning ourselves, by a volun- 
tary circumscription, a psychical semi-suicide. 



XV. 

THE LIFE TO COME. 

[The following was written to a friend in the country, a 
scholar and thinker, a refined thoughtful writer, who alter- 
nates studious in-door work with agricultural enjoyments, 
and the improvement of helpful animal breeds. In the let- 
ter, to which this is an answer, this gentleman had thrown 
out distrusts and paradoxical hints, to pique and prompt his 
correspondent.] 

When, to provide winter food for your cat- 
tle, you plant turnips, you look sharply to the 
seed ; and when they are sprouted you do your 
best to have them grow thriftily from week to 
week, from month to month, so that may be 
most fully attained their end as healthful bo- 
vine nutriment. You overlook their whole life, 
and at the very first stage your thought runs 
to the last, each successive stage being a step 
in a progression. The same with your sheep. 
You strive for the best breeds to begin with, 
that the final outcome of wool or mutton may 
be satisfying. Every day of each individual 
animal is a preparation for the following day, 
an advancement upon the preceding. 



THE LIFE TO COME. Qf 

For your little boy this provident looking 
ahead is still more eager, and far more com- 
prehensive ; and while you are ever watchful 
that each day shall be a solid basis for to-mor- 
row, your imaginations are leaping forward to 
his school-days, his college-days, his manhood, 
his wedding-day, his ripeness and success. The 
present is father to the future, is ever shaping 
it. By a logical bond, indissoluble, the two 
are bound together ; and the higher, the more 
life-saturated, the more significant and pro- 
phetic the being of the creature is, the more 
pregnant is the bond, and the more precious 
each link in its inseparable enchainment. Your 
life is a palpitating, categorical continuity (that 
has an Alemannic smack that you will like), 
each consecutive joint of it a transmitter of 
the past to the future, its earlier throbs as 
necessarily linked to the later as are the flashes 
of the two termini of a telegraphic cable. The 
end cannot be sundered from the beginning. 
And when and where is the end ? 

In your interesting, suggestive letter of 
March 10, you say : " I would willingly leave 
unsolved all the questions of the life to come, 
if any teacher would tell me how to settle those 
of this life. ,> But is not to-morrow, next month, 
7 



98 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

next year, a part of our life to come ? The 
man who is indifferent to what is to happen to 
him next week or next year is likely to find 
himself, by and by, in the poor-house ; for if 
he neglects to look providently toward his life 
to come, this will be done for him ; it must be 
done by somebody. A turnip's life reaches 
its end in six months, a sheep's in as many 
years, and a man's its earthly end in as many 
decades. They who guard his childhood, if 
they are good guardians, have ever in mind 
his future stages, his life to come. " In bring- 
ing up a child, think of its old age," says deep 
Joubert. Is a man's life like a turnip's or a 
sheep's, to end here " on this shoal of time," 
in dust ? Is a man but a brain-crowned corpus, 
temporarily endued with volition and ratiocina- 
tion and imagination and aspiration ? After 
getting rid of this body, I should not like to 
find myself in the poor-house of spirits. 

" What has religion to do with Heaven ? " 
you ask. Religion is the wakefulness of those 
sensibilities which bind our present being to 
its future trans-earthly being, involving thus 
a consciousness and acknowledgment of, and 
a submission to, the vast invisible creative 
might that encompasses us. Sensation, cau- 



THE LIFE TO COME. 99 

tion, and intellect combine to watch provi- 
dently over our bodies ; religion performs a 
like office for our souls. As sensation warns 
us against what is hurtful to body, spiritual 
sensibility warns us what is hurtful to soul, 
especially in the life which is to come after 
the fleshly envelope shall have been cast. The 
being of the body implies shape and size ; the 
being of the soul implies religious appetence. 
If we have souls, or, to speak more philosophi- 
cally, if we are souls, we must be religious ; 
that is, we must feel ourselves coupled to the 
Infinite Soul, must be liable to be prompted 
to aspire toward the Eternal, be ever capable 
of feeling that we are in a sublime, unimagin- 
ably resplendent presence, be subject to moods 
of admiration and awe at thought of the in- 
visible Mightiness. Men are spirits. Their 
being spirits gives them this transcendent 
privilege. Had they it not, they were not 
spirits, and might adopt as their creed the 
saying of one of the sprightly interlocutors 
in Beaumarchais , famous comedy, the "Mar- 
iage de Figaro : " — 

"Boire quand on n'a pas soif, faire Famour 
en touts temps — il n'y a que 5a qui nous dis- 
tingue des autres betes." 



100 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

Wordsworth's wish, which he applied to his 
life on earth, — 

" And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety/' 

should embrace our whole life, so that from the 
earth-stage we may pass without jar or fall or 
disappointment to the ultra-earth stage. 

" They end not here, our appetites — 
On earth they but begin : 
For though our bodies rot, their rights 
Survive as bliss or sin. 

u A marriage deep, without divorce, 
Is that of spirit and flesh, 
And from the cold relapsing corpse 
Springs life forever fresh. 

" The body's members are no toys 
For the soul's sublunar play : 
But counters that, in griefs or joys, 
Sum what the soul must pay. 

" How fruitful is the littleness 
Wherewith our souls are vext, 
When acorns of this world express 
Oaks rooted in the next." 

You refer to the vexed and vexing problem 
of the existence of evil. Could we get a view 
of our world from a high enough point, might 
we not possibly discover that there is nothing 
absolutely evil? By aid of the microscope 



THE LIFE TO COME. IOI 

our physical vision finds beauty in mouldiest 
clods, wonders in dullest matter. Were our 
moral vision similarly armed, might not that 
look globular and symmetrical which now seems 
flat and deformed, that useful which now seems 
obstructive, that attractive which is now repul- 
sive, that beneficent which now looks malig- 
nant ? In the bounded view we commonly get 
we often find that what we thought a calamity 
proves a benefaction. What we call evil is 
always a consequence of a breach of law. To 
tell your son that his toothache is caused by 
the breaking of a physiological law by him, 
or his parents, or his grandparents, will not, 
to be sure, check the pain ; nor do I think 
the toothache a spiritual lever. But man can 
learn — and it is the most fruitful of his les- 
sons — that law is absolute, and in its aim be- 
neficent ; that aim being, along with growth, 
stability, conservation, improvement. Which- 
ever way we turn we are met by law, and we 
soon perceive that law is uniform and irre- 
sistible, and that we prosper in proportion as 
we conform ourselves to its behests. Could we 
always submit us to law, physically, morally, 
intellectually, spiritually, we should be com- 
pletely prosperous. Law is an ever-active ideal, 



1 02 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

above us, around us, correcting us, guiding us, 
cultivating us, inviting us, exalting us. The 
nations and the individuals that have dis- 
covered and that obey the most and deepest 
laws are the most advanced and the wisest and 
best. 

But why are not all laws laid bare in a way 
that we could follow and obey them all, and 
thus escape suffering ? This would be making 
the earth a Methodist heaven. How would 
you like to do nought but sing hallelujahs for 
seventy years ? Let us all be made perfect, 
and we should have no goal beyond us, no 
summit above us to climb at, no motive to 
movement, and thence no joy in mental life, 
whose great spring and privilege is activity, 
aim, projection, progress, and whose greatest 
delight is to grasp something out of the un- 
known and add it to the known. To be aye 
reaching up for a higher, to be open forever 
to new revelations, to grow unceasingly — such 
is the birthright of man. What a destiny ! 
how vast, how beautiful ! What various and 
boundless range of life ! Mere animals have 
only a sensuous, sensual range, and that mo- 
mentary and short. Your favorite ram can 
only see from one field to another ; you can 



THE LIFE TO COME. 103 

behold stars that are so far off their light has 
been thousands of years in coming to your 
eye ; and in thought you can travel beyond 
the visible spheres, and you can think of artd 
believe in a happy endless hereafter. That 
men can so believe is the subtlest proof of 
their spirituality and immortality. In a sound 
mind is there an anticipation that cannot be 
fulfilled ? 

Don't distress yourself because " the big fish 
eat the little fish, and the little fish eat mud/' 
Their mode of life and of death is accommo- 
dated to their sensibilities. Mud is as grate- 
ful to the palate of the fish that eats it as 
woodcock is to yours; and woodcock is after 
all but a cunning elaboration of mud. But 
why so much death ? Why this terrible catas- 
trophe ? Wherefore die at all ? Because with- 
out daily removal by death the surface of the 
earth would grow encumbered with matter, 
and thus would get to be a moving dung-heap. 
Besides, death being " most in apprehension," 
animals escape the worst of it ; and as it is 
seen that men who have suffered from this 
apprehension meet death calmly and without 
fear, we may infer that it is made easy to ani- 
mals. And to men it has been made fearful 



1 04 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

chiefly by shallow, spurious, extravagant, in- 
fernal (don't miss the pun) theologies. Death 
is not a catastrophe ; it is not a coming to an 
end. It is a crisis of change, a bridge of tran- 
sition into another state. In the case of ani- 
mals, it is logical transformation ; in the case 
of man, it is logical promotion. 

The creative Mightiness and sufficiency 
manifest themselves in Law. Law is perfec- 
tion. It is no sign of " deficiency of power " 
in the creative mind that we and all about 
us are created imperfect. Imperfection is de- 
manded for what constitutes the life of life, 
progression, the joy of change, the delight of 
improvement, the exhilaration of ascent. Law, 
being perfect, is ever beckoning us toward 
perfection. Human life could not be lived 
without hope ; and hope implies a something 
brighter and better and happier in the future, 
and implies therefore a present imperfection 
and a growth out of it. Imperfection is the 
ground whence spring up stimulants to motion, 
to activity, to aspiration. Without imperfec- 
tion there were no expectation, no curiosity, 
no color, no ecstasy, on earth neither smiles 
nor tears, neither comedy nor tragedy. 

" Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity." 



THE LIFE TO COME. 105 

Were life pure white, it would be monotonous, 
tedious, lifeless, beside being invisible. 

Toward the end of your letter you say, " Can- 
not you write me a few lines, comforting and 
instructive ? " When you wrote these words 
you violated a law — that of prudence ; and so 
you are visited with the evil of these many 
pages. Look out, when you walk among rat- 
tlesnakes, not to break this law again, but pro- 
vide yourself against " the serpent's tooth " 
with thick leggins ; for the serpent has as 
much right to his venom as man has to his, 
and ejects it less malignantly. 



XVI. 

BOOKS FOR BOYS. 
(in a letter to a lady.; 

To the bounded extent that it can be granted, 
willingly I grant the request of your earnest 
letter. " How shall I educate my son that he 
may become a wise and happy man ? " this is 
what you ask. Could any one, could a con- 
vocation of the wisest, be sure of teaching you 
this ? A child is too vivid an individuality, 
that its coming character be so absolutely 
moulded from without. Nevertheless, for chil- 
dren much may always be done, in most cases 
very much, and especially where there is will 
and intellect moved by a love so deep as yours 
for your boy. " Tell me what books are best 
for him : there are so many books." Many, and 
yet so few that will nourish the mind of a child 
or a youth. You, perhaps, think that to one 
versed in books an answer to this question will 
be easy. Were you to ask me how most natu- 
rally, and therefore healthfully, to feed your son's 
body, I should say, — give him bread (good 



BOOKS FOR BOYS. I07 

bread) and fruit and water. Let no flattering 
food touch his palate, and above all, no stimu- 
lant in meat or drink. As to what should be 
set before his mind, follow the same principle. 
Keep away from him all -pages in which there 
is thought or feeling exaggerated, or forced, or 
insidiously attractive ; in which there is any- 
thing one-sided, or superficial, or delusive — 
in a word, all pages in which there is falsehood 
however dressed or disguised. Let him not 
be cheated by what he reads. The food of his 
mind should be clean and sweet with sincerity 
and truth — truth of fact, truth of principle, 
truth of feeling. 

But this you know : you wish to be told the 
names of the books whose pages will be whole- 
some for your boy. Were he six or eight years 
older, I could more readily tell you. I have 
known, however, of young readers, not over 
twelve years, who, of their own motion, took to 
Shakespeare. If your son has not done so, try 
him with " The Tempest," or "Twelfth Night," 
or " As You Like It," or " Much Ado About 
Nothing." Shakespeare is the best reading I 
know for minor or adult. There is in Shake- 
speare more fidelity and fullness, more sense 
and purity, more liveliness and solidity, more 



1 08 BRIEF ESSA VS. 

truth and more poetry, than in any other writer. 
His large faculty of wonder stretches open the 
minds of the young, which are then filled with 
images of beauty. They can take in but a 
part of him, but their imaginations are warmed 
and grandly peopled. Intellect and feeling are 
both educated by his pages as they will be by 
no others. If a boy can gain admittance to 
the personages of Shakespeare, they are the 
best company he can keep. When with them, 
a child of intelligence and sensibility will be 
fascinated, he knows not why, Shakespeare is 
so full of blood, so full of soul. 

Good biographies, well-told lives of the truly 
great, are excellent reading for the young. We 
have two that American boys should delight 
in — Washington and Columbus, by Irving. 
Here, while storing his brain with the doings 
and personality of two supreme men, the young 
reader has the gain of unconsciously learning 
history. Franklin's autobiography is not a 
book for the very young. Plutarch is always 
a resource ; I wish we had a livelier, more 
idiomatic English version. A dozen years ago 
an admirable life of the Chevalier Bayard was 
published in New- York, written by W. Gilmore 
Simms. There are, I believe, several Lives of 



BOOKS FOR BOYS. ICX) 

Sir Philip Sidney. These two rose to so rare 
a moral height, that their characters and con- 
duct are inspiring models. John Forster, of 
the Inner Temple, is the author of valuable 
H Lives of Eminent British Statesmen," leaders 
in the Great Rebellion, Pym, Hampden, Crom- 
well, Vane, Marten. So closely are their ca- 
reers interwoven with national events, these 
events themselves being the wrestling of great 
principles, that the report of the parts played 
by these eminent actors is more reflective than 
narrative. But the period and the conflict are 
so stirring and momentous, that an aspiring 
tractable boy will not be therefore repelled. 
Besides, boys, when once mounted on the nar- 
ration, have a ready way of galloping across 
the reflective field 

Hartley Coleridge wrote three volumes about 
" Northern Worthies," Andrew Marvell, Bent- 
ley, Lord Fairfax, Lady Anne Clifford, Roger 
Ascham, Captain Cook and others — an in- 
structive series, scholarly, conscientious, sound 
in feeling and written in good English. Hartley 
had much of the fine quality of his great father, 
S. T. Coleridge. Wrangham's " British Plu- 
tarch," in six volumes, has some value, con- 
taining brief biographies of one hundred noted 



110 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

Englishmen, from Wolsey to Nelson. But it 
wants both research and style. The latter 
want would make it distasteful to boys, for 
these have a quick feeling for life and light in 
the printed page. 

History — which is the biography of nations 
— dealing with organic masses, is but partially 
within reach of immature intelligence, and of 
histories written for the young one should be 
mistrustful. That they be well executed, ar- 
tistic as well as historic gifts are needed. Even 
then, in trying to adapt the account of com- 
plicated events and characters to the simpli- 
city of the youthful mind, there is danger that 
both be falsified. Thus to qualify history, with- 
out unmanning it, is next to impossible. Could 
not a capable boy of 12 or 14, who likes to 
read, fasten himself upon Motley's " Rise of the 
Dutch Republic," and its continuation, * The 
History of the United Netherlands " ? Here, 
told with the animation of sympathy, is the 
story of a handful of heroic men who, through 
two generations, carried on, with unsurpassed 
courage, persistency and self-sacrifice, against 
the then most powerful empire on the globe, 
a struggle for the dearest rights of manhood, 
ending in a success which was a gain to the 



BOOKS FOR BOYS. Ill 

whole of Christendom. In following the for- 
tunes of the indomitable Hollanders, the reader 
hugs to his heart their sublime leader, and a 
boy can have no intimates more profitable, 
more precious, than William the Silent and 
Washington ; but he must have it in him to 
make them his friends by loving and admiring 
them. 

For a boy's reading tne difficulty is to get 
books with a soul in them — books that one 
can shake hands with, so real are they and so 
attaching. The same with his teachers — one 
teacher will make attractive what under another 
will be repulsive. As to what studies (beyond 
the universally necessary for every educated 
man) will be most suitable for your son, that will 
depend on his individual proclivities ; whether 
his talents be literary or scientific or artistic ; 
whether he be inwardly impelled to action or to 
quiet studiousness. Men of action are mostly 
not given to books ; and boys, whose bent is 
decidedly toward action, will not be furthered 
by an enforced attention to reading and study. 
Nor are artists apt to be fond of the printed 
page ; their business is to express, to give out, 
not to absorb from others. The three or four 
most distinguished artists I know read little. 
In the school-books of boys, who have plastic 



112 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

gifts, the pages most used will be the blank fly- 
leaves, which will be found covered with draw- 
ings and figures. If your son has a well-defined 
tendency, a proved inclination for any partic- 
ular field of work or study, encourage him 
in that. What a boy goes at with love he will 
do well. The choice of nature should always 
be accepted. 

But the moral side — thence it is that come 
your deepest anxieties. The hopes that are 
the joy of a natural mother are daily darkened 
by thoughts of the dangerous world your child 
is soon to enter and work in. To the maternal 
imagination he is on the border of an ominous 
wilderness, where crouch wolves and serpents 
ready to howl and hiss — where reigns a lurid 
twilight terrible with baited traps and masked 
pitfalls. For your son you " dread youth and 
young manhood." You have suffered yourself, 
you see others suffer from the malice, or false- 
hood, or coldness, or rapacity of those around 
them. But within you was an inner energy be- 
fore which evil slank away and danger quailed. 
A triumphant mother, you have brought your 
child through twelve years which you almost 
shudder to look back upon. Has not he a 
manful share of this inward power for self- 
protection ? Has he not that in him through 



BOOKS FOR BOYS. II3 

which you can make him feel so intense a self- 
respect, that he shall be able to walk through 
temptation and corruption unstained and un- 
bowed ? It is a something higher than pride, 
stronger than self-reliance, this feeling of thor- 
ough self-respect. It is a soul-energy, which 
masters the whole being for its good, which 
watches with a vigilance to which even that 
of dutiful mothers is drowsiness. It is the 
sense of duty and the sense of honor held in 
hand by the divine individuality within. Make 
your son keenly aware of this pure lofty self, 
with its tutelary authority. Make him con- 
scious that always, everywhere, in all cases, in 
every emergency, trial, solicitation, he carries 
within him an inseparable angel, to warn, shield, 
and rescue him ; make him really know this, and 
you may loosen "your mothers arms around 
him. ,, He hears a voice surer, more awaken- 
ing, more commanding, aye, even more puri- 
fying than a " mother's whispers." You would 
like him to have friends ; these are good for 
him to have. You would like to be ever so 
near him, as to be yourself his never-failing 
friend ; this were good. But all this is naught 
to making himself his friend. All men may 
be helped by friends ; we all can and should 



1 1 4 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

help one another ; but finally, no one can save 
a man but himself ; and he or she who makes 
him fully aware of this is his best friend out- 
side of himself. Out of your own strong warm 
heart teach your son to value himself; not 
from pride or ambition or through self-com- 
parison with others, but through a clear over- 
powering sense of personal responsibility, re- 
sponsibility to his higher self; teach him this, 
and you " put upon him plate-armor which shall 
shield him," not from all suffering and sorrow 
on this temporary earth, where our chief busi- 
ness should be to better ourselves spiritually 
— there are sorrows and sufferings that are 
purifying and invigorating — but from harm 
from without. Thus will be averted or neu- 
tralized the hostile influences that still ply 
around a young man, ever ready to assail him. 
You do a high duty in getting the best teachers 
you can for your son, in teaching him your- 
self; but his best teacher is himself. All his 
life, should he live to a hundred, should be 
education, and the best of it self-education. 
But I must close. What I have here set down, 
although so fragmentary and insufficient, makes 
a long letter ; if you get from it a hint or two, 
or a corroborating breath of sympathy, it will 
not have been written in vain. 



XVII. 

FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 

I would pay my share of tribute to the 
character, qualities, and doings of a man who 
in the past few years has become dear to very 
many far beyond the precincts of his parish 
in Brighton, England, where, in 1853, he died 
at the early age of thirty-seven. 

Men there are with such fullness of the 
higher life in their brains that they overflow 
procreatively upon their fellows. Of this chosen 
few was Robertson, one of those deep, pure, 
abundant human springs that, at far intervals 
along our track, gush up strong and clear, 
where all may drink and be slaked, the laborer 
and the lord, the scholar and the artisan, man 
and woman. The depth and beauty and lim- 
pidity and, I will add, the practicality, of 
Robertson's teaching all come from its spiritu- 
ality. Few are as intelligent as he ; and so 
spiritually-minded I know, in our generation, 
of no man who has been in the public eye. 
He was a many-sided man, morally and intel- 



Il6 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

lectually. Had he not been what he became, 
— a light such as shone from no other pulpit 
within the British realm, — he might have 
made himself an influential parliamentary ora- 
tor, or a far-eyed military leader, foremost in 
the advance, or a brilliant scientific expounder. 
Into a close tissue were woven threads various, 
rich, elastic, to give strength and beauty to 
the vocation which his father, with a wise in- 
stinct, chose for him. 

The ruling principle of Robertson's life was 
dutifulness. At the command of this he sacri- 
ficed his preference for the army to submit 
him to the preference of his father. Having 
done so, he threw the whole of his rare energies 
into the work of qualification. One of the 
first of his self-imposed tasks was, to imbue 
himself with the New Testament ; and this 
task he set about with so earnest a will that 
in a short time he had the whole by heart, the 
Greek as well as the English. The qualities 
requisite to make a clergyman what he should 
be, he enumerates in the ninth lecture on St. 
Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians : " Great 
powers of sympathy ; a mind masculine in its 
strength, feminine in its tenderness ; humble- 
ness ; wisdom to direct ; that knowledge of 



FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 117 

the world which the Bible calls the wisdom of 
the serpent ; and that knowledge of evil which 
comes rather from repulsion from it than from 
personal contact with it." A conscientious 
man, with this ideal of his life-work, would 
not have easy years. To such a one the car- 
dinal question, what is truth ? would press ur- 
gently. Ceaselessly disturbed by discontent 
with himself, Robertson at times would ex- 
claim, " I am nothing but a stump-orator." 
Seeing the crowds that choked his church, 
Sunday after Sunday, and the breathless at- 
tention he constrained them to, he would, in 
moments of over-anxious self-examination, re- 
proach himself with drawing and holding this 
throng through the mere gifts of the platform- 
speaker ; whereas into these discourses he so 
poured his life, past and present, that, as one 
of his intimate friends, Lady Byron, said of him, 
" he was sowing himself beyond his strength." 
In the pulpit he spoke out, as in his daily 
doings he strove to act out, what at the close 
of the great sermon on " Caiaphas' view of 
Christian Sacrifice" he lays down as the true 
human life : " Life is elevation of soul — noble- 
ness — divine character. The spirit of Caiaphas 
was death : to receive all and give nothing ; 



Il8 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

to sacrifice others to himself. The spirit of 
Christ was life : to give and not receive ; to 
be sacrificed, and not to sacrifice. Hear Him 
again — He that loseth his life, the same shall 
find it. That is life : the spirit of losing all 
for Love's sake. That is the soul's life, which 
alone is blessedness and heaven." Ever is 
this one of his inspiring themes. In the beau- 
tiful discourse in the same volume (the first) 
on the new commandment of Love to one an- 
other, he thus comments on the mocking speech, 
He saved others, himself he cannot save : " Un- 
consciously these enemies were enunciating 
the very principle of Christianity, the grand 
law of all existence, that only by losing self 
can you save others ; that only by giving life 
you can bless." 

One of Robertson's friends said, " His life 
is in his sermons." That the sermons were 
the fruit of his life, of his inmost movement, 
that in them he exhibited what he was and 
what he strove to be, — to this was due their 
sustained thrilling power over his weekly hear- 
ers, and to this too, is due that we, his readers, 
are by them so warmed, so uplifted. Nowhere 
is there a trace of sentimentality, of feeling as- 
sumed or super-subtleized or thinly expanded ; 



FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 119 

nowhere any ostentation of intellectuality, of 
dialectic gymnastics. He is always cordial, 
always in earnest. His sermons are aglow 
with a large lucent soul : they pulsate with 
spiritual life : they are mellow with the finest 
juice of humanity. Thence are they so deeply, 
so uniquely attractive. The life written in 
these great discourses is the literary oratorical 
embodiment of the searchings and the medi- 
tations, the bafflings and the aspirations, of 
his daily, hourly, unwritten life, — the projec- 
tion of his luminous personality into public 
prominence. In Robertson there was no vicious 
dualism : he never seemed what he was not. 
His preaching had its roots in his individual 
strivings after a better practice ; and when his 
words grow gorgeous and tremulous in delinea- 
ting possible blessedness, they rise on the 
wings of a healthful imagination, not on the 
bubbles of a wordy redundance. 

A mind so progressive, eager, susceptible, 
would be especially sensitive to the winds of 
doctrine which, at the period of Robertson's 
entrance into the Church, were blowing in 
strong counter-currents over the sea of Eng- 
lish theology. The Tractarians were in the full 
momentum of their retrogressive movement. 



1 20 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

For a while he rolled somewhat unsteadily 
amid the conflicting waves of controversy, and 
it was only after his settlement in Brighton, 
that he became so clear and firm in his con- 
victions as to sail right onward with confidence 
and steady self-reliance. Of the five volumes 
of sermons, — all preached at Brighton in the 
last six years of his life, — the chief burthen 
is, Christianity is a life, not a creed. His 
" Master " was his ever present exemplar ; and 
nowhere is the spirituality of that sublime 
lonely life set forth more vividly. 

"To saturate life with God, and the world 
with Heaven, that is the genius of Chris- 
tianity ." " God is the father of the whole hu- 
man race, and not of a mere section of it : a 
divine spirit is the source of all goodness in 
man : the righteousness acceptable in his 
sight is not ceremonial, but moral, goodness : 
the only principle which reconciles the soul to 
God, making it one with God, is self-sacrifice : 
this is the essence of Christianity." " The first 
lesson of Christianity is this, — Be true ; and 
the second this, — Be true ; and the third this, 
— Be true." " Christ's rule was, if any man 
will do his will. A blessed rule, a plain and 
simple. Whatever else may be wrong, it must 



FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 121 

be right to be pure, to be just and tender, and 
merciful and honest. It must be right to love, 
and to deny one's self. Let him do the will 
and he shall know. Observe ; men begin the 
other way. They say, if I could but believe, 
then I would make my life true. If I could 
but be sure what is truth, then I would set to 
work to live in earnest. No ; God says, Act — 
make the life true, and then you will be able 
to believe : Live in earnest, and you will know 
the answer to what is truth." " The Pharisees 
could conceive no goodness free, but only that 
which is produced by rewards and punish- 
ments, — law goodness, law righteousness : to 
dread God, not to love and trust Him, was their 
conception of religion. And this, indeed, is 
the ordinary conception of religion. " Expan- 
sions of these and similar central sentiments 
are, for the most part, the substance of Robert- 
son's discourses. Mysteries he makes trans- 
parent by the solvent of common sense, — 
common sense, as so happily defined by the 
Duke of Wellington in a conversation with 
Rogers, — "a good understanding modulated 
by a good heart." The heart of Robertson 
was a deep spring of sympathies, wrought 
by a strong compact intellect into showers, 



1 2 2 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

through which there sparkled so divine a light 
that it entranced, while warming and refresh- 
ing, the hearts of his hearers. And his style 
partakes of the power and beauty of this union. 
It has that throbbing vivacity, that elastic un- 
dulation, which style may have when thought 
has been steeped in the riches of a soul. 

Never did man more faithfully follow his 
own great primary precept — Be true. He 
was true to all his duties, true to his fellow 
men in every relation, true to himself. Man- 
liness, in the heartiest meaning of the word, 
he had. To him may be applied what Napo- 
leon said after his interview with Goethe, — 
"There you have a man" The blessing he 
was to so many near and around him has not 
ceased with his life on earth : we feel it through 
the record left of his speech and his deeds. 
The glowing words he uses to describe St. 
Paul might serve for his own epitaph : " A 
heart, a brain, and a soul of fire : all his life 
a suppressed volcano : his acts, ' living things 
with hands and feet:' his words, 'half bat- 
tles.'" 



XVIII. 

goethe's faust. 

The poet must make himself one with his 
subject, which then comes from him new-born, 
steeped in the juice of his own being. This he 
can only do through intense sympathy ; and 
thence, to reproduce a large deep subject (a 
tragedy of Hamlet or of Lear) the poet must 
have a large deep nature. His heart must 
throb with the heart of what he would create, 
else he can not create it. Into Faust, as his 
masterpiece and the longest of his poetic works, 
Goethe put more of himself than into any other. 
The principles he had thought out ; the knowl- 
edge he had ripened ; the temptations, joys, tri- 
als, vexations, he had undergone, his aspirations 
and his disappointments — all is in Faust ; the 
depths of his mind, the woes of his heart — all 
transfigured by poetry. Never did poet, saving 
Dante, put so much of himself into a single 
poem, nor was there ever poet, saving Shake- 
speare, who had so much to put in. 

When Coleridge said that the Faust of 



1 24 BRIEF ESS A KS. 

Goethe wants causation, he said what is true ; 
but when he meant this as a reproach, it seems 
to me he was mistaken. Faust is not, and is 
not called, a drama. The title-page reads, 
" Faust, a Tragedy." It is a lyrical tragedy. 
Goethe's organization was lyrical, not dramatic. 
His aesthetic forte was the utterance of feeling 
in song, ballad, elegy, narrative, or dialogue ; 
and when, in order to have scope for character- 
ization, in which he was a master, he chose 
dialogue, the production was dramatic in form, 
more than in essence. It would hava no dra- 
matic shock of incidents, no rapid material 
progression, no stirring muscular movement, 
no shifting interaction of hostile personages, 
but would give embodiment to an interplay 
of strong or tender emotion, to inward strug- 
gles, to overflow of passionate feeling, wrought 
into scenes vivid and varied and stamped with 
beauty of form. Such are "Iphigenia" and 
" Tasso," and even " Egmont " — all dramas in 
outward shape, — lyric expansions in dialogue. 
Goethe was warned against Faust as a sub- 
ject that has already been often treated, and 
with small results. Wise monitors ! As if to 
a poet the subject were anything more than a 
mould, and a pliable, expansible mould, into 



GOETHE'S FAUST. 125 

which to pour himself. His predecessors had 
failed, because they had little or nothing to put 
into the mould. Faust, as being a popular le- 
gend, and a popular legend sprung out of the 
depths of the human soul, lent itself with ease 
to genuinely poetic treatment, and especially to 
a poet of such manifold endowment as Goethe, 
whose lyrical predilections, too, had here, in 
the legendary character of the theme, a clear 
field for indulgence. There was no need to 
bind the scenes in dramatic continuity, in log- 
ical necessity : they could be kept close enough 
together by the flowing reins of emotional con- 
trol, held in hand by the boldest artistic inven- 
tion. From its compass and free privileges, the 
subject was particularly attractive to Goethe, 
who clung to it all his life, taking it up in early 
manhood and completing it in his eighty-sec- 
ond year. 

Goethe had such facility of expression that 
he was only saved from running into verbiage 
by his strong and exacting intellect, and he 
had such fullness of sensibility that he was only 
saved from sentimentalism by his sound ethic 
as well as aesthetic feeling. But this rare com- 
bination and balance of high qualities give a 
precision and compactness to his expression, 



1 26 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

and a closeness to the texture of his thought, 
which make him in his best pages — and his 
best pages count by thousands — an author 
difficult to translate ; and, of all his poems, 
Faust is the most difficult. And yet Faust 
must be translated. The light therein must 
not be hidden away from all the rest of the 
reading world under the wrappage of a single 
language. And we can say, without being 
chargeable with American brag, that the two 
best translations of Faust into English have 
been made by two of our countrymen, Mr. C. 
T. Brooks, and Mr. Bayard Taylor, 

Christianity, civilization, progress, have been, 
and are now more than ever, nourished by 
translations. What if Isaiah and Job and Da- 
vid do lose somewhat of their original poetic 
sheen in the transit from Hebrew into English. 
Without translation we should have had no 
Bible — not a chapter. What do we of this re- 
mote generation not owe to the translators of 
Plato and Plutarch ? As the nations of Chris- 
tendom grow more and more united, the more 
is the need, the greater the service, of transla- 
tion for the furtherance of science, literature, 
advancement, freedom. Goethe is one of the 
master minds of the world. His sixty volumes 



GOETHE'S FAUST. 12 J 

are in themselves a literature ; his pages are 
full of wisdom and light ; and, of all his beau- 
tiful creations, Faust is the most original and 
the most commanding. 

Goethe declares that "he who cannot get 
it into his head that spirit and matter, soul 
and body, thought and extension, or, as a late 
French writer expresses it, will and movement, 
were, are, and ever will be the necessary double 
ingredients of the Universe, which demand for 
themselves equal rights, and therefore both to- 
gether may be looked upon as representatives 
of God — that man should give up all attempt to 
be a thinker, and give all his days to the com- 
mon noisy business of the world." Goethe's 
spirituality admitted matter to an equal alli- 
ance : he would not therefore have given assent 
to Joubert's position : " To create the world a 
grain of matter sufficed ; for all that we see, 
this mass which affrights us, is nothing but a 
grain which the Eternal has created and set to 
work." 

In the second part of Faust there might be, 
along with the purification through outward 
activity, an inly-originating and inly-working 
emotion, tending to cleanse and uplift the 
whole man and his doings, giving to his activi- 



128 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

ties larger scope and deeper meaning. This 
inward self-stirred spiritual source was not so 
deep in Goethe as to play in his greatest crea- 
tion a controlling part. Faust sweeps through 
a wide circle, but here was a segment of it 
which he passed over, without getting from it 
all the light it is capable of imparting. 

The product of a nature so rich, thoughtful, 
and true, Faust involves sound moral lessons. 
Through the depth and wisdom of his writings 
Goethe has done much to condemn and correct 
the very aberrations himself fell into. As poet- 
thinker, he did more than any man of his age 
to clear the general atmosphere. 



XIX. 

SHELLEY. 

If to have the power to lift his theme into 
a light so fresh, so penetrating, that it reveals 
sides, qualities, relations, never presented be- 
fore, — a light self-kindled in the lifter's soul ; 
if to be full of thoughts, images, conceptions, 
as new as beautiful, and so full of them that 
they are irresistibly urgent for rhythmical ut- 
terance, and when uttered give a new delight 
and a new virtue to the capable reader ; if to 
exalt the earthly that it shall look heavenly, 
to irradiate the common that it shall glisten 
with unsuspected life, to make the motions of 
daily being converge to a focus so lastingly 
brilliant that men's eyes are drawn to it 
through the ages, their vision being thereby 
purged and strengthened ; if to be and do all 
this is to be a poet, Shelley takes rank among 
the foremost of those whose function it is to 
enkindle and refine and elevate and liberate 
their fellow- men. Rays shot from a central 
core, ever aflame with love and aspiration, 
9 



1 30 'BRIEF ESS A VS. 

are the lines of Shelley. Than his poems 
more genuine emanations from a poet's inmost 
were never penned. Through them throbs a 
great heart, the heart of an earnest, unselfish, 
loving man ; and this manly throb gives sub- 
stance and an added brilliancy to their poetic 
sparkle. 

In literature to create is to breathe a soul 
into your theme. Divest " Hamlet " of Shake- 
speare, and it is a vulgar tale of lusts clotted 
with blood. Take the poetry out of " Mid- 
summer Night's Dream," and Theseus and 
Hypollita and Hermia and their fellows are 
graceless egotists, whose talk one would not 
tolerate for five minutes ; and Oberon and 
Titania and Puck, those everlasting most vi- 
vacious of realities, would suddenly sink out 
of sight into the earth, as being now more 
valueless than the weeds which deform its sur- 
face, for these have roots and a life in them. 
Ask the first man you meet what he has to 
say of the West Wind. The liveliest answer 
you would get would be one like that of the 
lady who, when her companion uttered his de- 
light at the frisking play of lambs in a field, 
said, she preferred them with mint sauce. A 
clever man and a ready might, without shame, 
have naught to say of the West Wind. Now 



SHELLEY. 131 

read Shelley's ode, to learn what a marvel- 
ously poetical theme it may be made by a 
great poet who puts himself into it in one of 
his best moods. 

The " Ode to the West Wind " is especially 
characteristic of Shelley, because it is so pure- 
ly poetical ; for when Shelley is most himself, 
his mind is most creative, he being essen- 
tially, predominantly, a poet. And the poet is 
most a poet when he can spin a lasting web 
out of his own brain. This Ode is further- 
more characteristic of Shelley because it is so 
self-evolved, thought awakening thought in- 
terminably within him, imagination then waft- 
ing him from peak to peak of multitudinous 
sunlit creation. This rapid procreative energy 
is a mark of the highest mental resource, in- 
volving intellectual originality with swift and 
wide imaginative swing. Note, in the follow- 
ing passage, how image shoots out of image, 
impromptu fertility lavishing poetic wealth, 
and with a logical fitness that keeps the shift- 
ing stream firmly bordered. Every comma is 
a momentary pause before a new bound. 

" O thou 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 
Each like a corpse within its grave, until 



132 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow 
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
With living hues and odors plain and hill." 

Each of the five stanzas furnishes similar 
poetically cumulative passages, passages piled 
up by an insatiate mental liveliness, ever feed- 
ing itself on fresh beauties of its own beget- 
ting. Again, this poem is characteristic because 
through its musical tenderness there sounds 
an undertone of sadness ; for to Shelley migfit 
be applied his own lines to the moon : — 

" Art thou pale for weariness 
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth ; 
Wandering companionless 
Among the stars that have a different birth ? ,T 

The "Ode to the West Wind" is not es- 
pecially characteristic of Shelley because of 
the fineness of the mental fibre transparent 
in it, for that is visible in all that he wrote. 
One of the most richly endowed of men, Shel- 
ley was at the same time one of the most ex- 
quisitely organized, His sensibilities kept his 
life in a frequent tremor, and at times, when 
his imagination fastened upon images of terror, 
(and he was liable to morbid moods when such 
images were most congenial) his agony almost 
convulsed him. When a negotiation was opened 



SHELLEY. . 133 

with the manager of Covent Garden theatre 
to get " The Cenci " performed, with Miss 
O'Neil as Beatrice, Shelley exclaimed, " God 
forbid that I should see her play it ! it would 
tear my nerves to pieces." This susceptibility 
made him recoil from the gross and robust and 
even from the palpable, while his intellectual 
subtlety, and his keen sense of the beautiful, 
ever tempted him into visionary fields, where 
he fashioned creatures who were largely ab- 
solved from the cumbersome conditions of 
earthly being. In a letter to one of his friends, 
Mr. Gisbourne, he says, speaking of " Epipsy- 
chidion " : " As to real flesh and blood, you 
know that I do not deal in those articles ; you 
might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of 
mutton as expect anything human or earthly 
from me." And that delicate resplendent crea- 
tion, " The Witch of Atlas," is prefaced with 
six stanzas addressed to his wife, " on her ob- 
jecting to the following poem, upon the score 
of its containing no human interest." 

This objection cannot be made to " Prome- 
theus Unbound." In conception, Shelley's Pro- 
metheus is grandly, intensely, human : in the 
execution its author yields to his overmaster- 
ing ethereal bent, to his delight in expanding 



134 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

towards the unreal. By virtue of imaginative 
force Shelley holds his visionary figures firmly 
before his mind : to him they are distinct and 
lively, because the filaments that hold them 
issue from his own brain. But these fine fila- 
ments soon snap in the reader's mental grasp, 
and the figures float off into the impalpable. 
The figures are but phantasms ; whereas it is 
only personages, humanly conditioned, that the 
reader can clasp long and close enough to feel 
and love them. In firm, pulse-thridded bodies 
the Divine Artist incarnates the ideas where- 
with He wishes to rejoice man's sense of the 
beautiful. Shelley's incarnations lack the earth- 
ly element : he had too much nerve and not 
enough muscle. Hence in his " Prometheus 
Unbound," stamped as it is with greatness, 
the conception is not vividly accomplished. 
The Gods and Spirits and Impersonations 
that play around Prometheus have not enough 
red blood in their arteries. It is not a drama 
(Shelley entitles it a lyrical drama), but a 
dramatic lyric ; that is, a self-rapt effusion, 
a soliloquy in dialogue rather than the ob- 
jective, organic structure, whose essence is 
characterization, which a drama should prop- 
erly be. The age was a lyrical age, so volcanic 



SHELLEY, I35 

with change, with passion, with aspiration, 
were the tempers and thoughts of men. 

In "The Cenci," Shelley plants himself firmly 
upon the earth, and weaves with the tremulous 
chords of human feeling, pages of passion and 
power that fill the reader with admiration. But 
the story is so revolting that the reader's im- 
agination refuses to harbor it, and the protago- 
nist of the drama is a monster so hideous as 
to be far out of the pale of human sympathy. 
Cenci, the father and husband, is a fiend, not 
a man : his doings spring not from human 
motives, they are the contortions of a blase 
demon. Beside him lago and Edmund are 
cherubs. To be sure, he was a reality, a re- 
ality engendered by the union of vice with 
despotism, of bestiality with superstition, which 
Rome presented (and only Rome could pre- 
sent) towards the end of the sixteenth century. 
But even the genius of Shelley cannot make 
Francesco Cenci a poetic reality, cannot make 
his criminal heart radiate a generic light, so 
far beneath the measure of the human scale 
is his moral deformity. So overwhelming are 
the deeds and personality of Cenci that the 
other personages are swamped in the mire of 
inhumanity through which he strides. All are 



I36 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

so pale in the lurid glare of his demoniacal 
will, that there is little room for characteriza- 
tion, little for dramatic collision, and none for 
variety. Shelley has made the most of a sub- 
ject to which he was drawn by that imagina- 
tive delight in excess which was one of his 
characteristics, and which, springing in him 
out of his very susceptibility to the beautiful, 
was liable to efface the beautiful with its de- 
vouring flame. In the preface to " The Cenci " 
he says : " The person who would treat such 
a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish 
the actual horror of the events, so that the 
pleasure which arises from the poetry which 
exists in these tempestuous sufferings and 
crimes may mitigate the pain of the contem- 
plation of the moral deformity from which they 
spring." But not even his rare poetic gift and 
thoughtful art can subdue the horror, but it 
will envelop the reader and the personages in 
unpoetic gloom. 

The Poems — now acknowledged to be 
among the most original and poetical in our 
language — that were published by Shelley 
before " The Cenci," met with no acceptance, 
and hardly with recognition ; but " The Cenci " 
was at least partly appreciated, and Mrs. Shel- 



SHELLEY. 137 

ley thought she saw in it the opening of a new 
mine, the working of which would further de- 
velop her husband's powers through the sym- 
pathy of the public. She endeavored to per- 
suade him to repeat an experiment which had 
proved so successful ; but Shelley, instead of 
yielding, wrote " The Witch of Atlas," the most 
exquisitely ideal and ethereal of his poems. In 
her note on " The Witch of Atlas," Mrs. Shel- 
ley says : " But my persuasions were vain ; 
the mind could not be bent from its natural 
inclination. Shelley shrank instinctively from 
portraying human passion, with its mixture of 
good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. 
Such opened again the wounds of his own 
heart ; and he loved to shelter himself rather 
in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love 
and hate, and regret, and lost hope, in such 
imaginations as borrowed their hues from sun- 
rise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or 
paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean 
or the shadows of the woods, — which cele- 
brated the singing of the winds among the 
pines, the flow of a murmuring stream, and 
the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature 
creates in her solitudes." 

In my judgment not " Prometheus" or "The 



1 3 8 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

Cenci," but " Adonais " is the masterpiece of 
Shelley. In it there is more of the poet Shel- 
ley, and more of the man Shelley, than in any 
other of his works ; and the result is that 
Adonais is the finest elegy and one of the best 
poems in literature. Here we witness what 
lightnings can flash from the love-enkindled 
soul of a great poet. While writing the elegy 
of Keats, Shelley wrote that of himself, and 
this half-conscious aim deepened the beauty 
and the pathos of this transcendent poem. 
The four stanzas which directly relate to him- 
self give the most brilliant and the most affect- 
ing portrait that was ever self-drawn : — 

" A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift, — 
Who in another's fate now wept his own." 

Who can read the sudden conclusion of this 
most touching, most tender, and most vivid 
portrait, without a thrill of awe ? 

In writing " Adonais," Shelley's best feelings, 
admiration of the admirable, poetic, and with 
it, personal sympathy for his great young rival, 
generous devotion, rightful wrath, were all 
keenly enlisted, and by the warmth of the oc- 
casion, and by the extraordinary demands made 
on him to celebrate a poet so unique, were 
fused into a glow, which, by the rare cunning 



SHELLEY. 139 

of his hand, was fluently moulded into those 
pliant lustrous forms which only shape them- 
selves in the sun of the most genial sense of 
the beautiful. Throughout all the fifty-five 
Spencerian stanzas there is the most easy and 
graceful and close and rapid interbraiding of 
emotion and thought. The poet is in his best 
mood. The personality of the theme, with his 
own affections and sorrows, hold his imagi- 
nation closely to its duty. His cloud-cleaving 
tendency is controlled to concentrate the whole 
roused man upon the beloved theme. Through 
the action of his wrought faculties he exerts, 
with a copiousness even more lavish than else- 
where, the poetic power of compelling remote 
things into neighborhood, unlike, into simili- 
tude, scattered, into unity ; but his illustrations 
and metaphors, even those brought from the 
farthest distances, are so apt and lively, that 
they cling to the thought before you, making 
it at once more clear and more compact. This 
high gift is used to put more life and charac- 
ter into the verse. In " Adonais " there is a 
stronger, steadier pulse than in any other of 
his poems. 



XX. 

SHAKESPEARE. 

Ever behind appearances sparkles their 
mysterious source, appreciable only by spirit- 
ual insight ; beneath all human doings sways 
their interior impulse, only fathomable by 
sympathy ; behind, beneath these mysterious 
sources, these interior impulses, weighing 
them, measuring them, is the supernal source 
and mind which, in its perfect purity, repels 
the finest mote of soil, and in its plenary mercy, 
ordains the purification of the foulest. To feel 
the spring of this supreme dominance in all 
movements and conjunctions, is a prerogative 
of man, enjoyed in fullness only through the 
translucent susceptibility of the highest genial 
endowment. Through intuitive cognizance of 
eternal law, through healthfullest fellow-feeling 
with human desires, through intense joy in all 
manifestations of life (a token this of aesthetic 
genius), Shakespeare, with unexampled fidelity 
to the deep primary demands, presents pictures 
of being, doing, and suffering, in their infinite 



SHAKESPEARE. 141 

modes and varieties. Like his own Prospero, 
" his Art is of such power/' he controls the 
stormiest motions of the soul, to play with 
them for his and our behoof. His gravest trag- 
edies are an earnest sport with human passion ; 
his lightest comedies are a playful conflict with 
human will. 

The incorporation, through superhuman cre- 
ative might, of thought and will in organic na- 
ture, is the daily wonder, ever renewed before 
our eyes : Idea, purpose, successfully, and 
therefore beautifully, realized in sensuous form 
and animated motion, the mysterious marriage 
which results in palpable being, the great un- 
fathomable act of genesis, brought momently 
before us, to delight and teach, to unfold and 
quicken the eager faculties of our finite and in- 
finite being ! The most valid stroke of creative 
might — if without arrogance the same terms 
may be used — by the human mind in the realm 
of literature is the reproduction out of itself, 
the incorporation of men who, thus man-made, 
shall speak and do as God-made men speak and 
do, with a like elastic carriage, a like psycholog- 
ical absolute individuality. To utter warm clear 
sentiment under the rhythmic press of lyrical 
inspiration, is a high exercise of mental power, 



1 42 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

but higher than this single act is the compound 
act which gives to the utterance a broader sig- 
nificance, a more definite meaning, by grafting 
it into a brain-projected human being. There- 
by the poetic strain becomes secondary to a 
concrete complex whole, and from being the all 
in all of the lyric, where it is the direct delivery 
of the poet, is subsidiary to a purpose higher 
than a personal effusion, and fitting its place as 
an exponent of character, gains both in brill- 
iancy and breadth. Characterization, the crea- 
tion of character, which can only be fully and 
permanently achieved through the vision and 
grasp of poetic power, and which implies a 
group of personages interacting one on the 
other in an organic series of doings, — charac- 
terization, in this aesthetic sense, is the loftiest 
literary achievement ; for, in addition to many 
single literary qualifications, such as flexibility 
of expression, graphic gift, figurative faculty, 
imaginative intensity, it demands fullness of 
mental endowment, and a warmth that shall 
fuse all these qualities to the furtherance of a 
complex artistic end ; and finally, as decisive 
equipment, it involves an intuitive insight into 
human nature combined with mimetic facility, 
so that the coordinated union of the above gifts 



SHAKESPEARE. 1 43 

may issue in rounded buoyant figures that shall 
move and speak like living men, only with a 
poetic transfiguration of soul through a poetic 
transparency of diction. The Germans are 
right to call Sterne and Cervantes poets ; for in 
none of the epic or dramatic verse of Christen- 
dom, outside of Shakespeare, is there more 
plastic poetic fullness, more aesthetic truth, than 
in their immortal masterpieces. 

To launch upon the sea of time a brain-built 
being so palpitating with soul, so mobile with 
individual life, that for centuries it keeps its 
freshness and wields its power amid the flesh 
and blood lords of reality, as do Macbeth and 
Don Quixote and my uncle Toby and Falstaff 
and Caliban, this proclaims a kinship with the 
invisible creative mind and mightiness, and ex- 
alts all humanity on the soaring wings of its 
sun-eyed poets. For the crowning mastership 
of characterization, Shakespeare, by his origi- 
nality, his fidelity to nature, and his universal- 
ity, takes the first place, being, as Coleridge 
with sympathetic insight so grandly says, a 
myriad-minded man. 

In this multiplicity of gifts there is one, at 
once the subtlest and the broadest of all, with 
which Shakespeare among poets is uniquely 



144 BRIEF ESSA VS. 

portioned, and which, standing him always in 
good stead, is especially serviceable in his high 
dramatic function of characterization : I mean 
his sympathy with the super-earthly. Hereby, 
through emotional divination, he has range of 
the peopled world of the invisible. By all the 
abler among his critics and commentators, this 
gift has been noted ; but has it been duly no- 
ted ? Much more is it than one superadded 
faculty which enables Shakespeare to annex 
another Province to his immense Empire. A 
light it is, a vast Sun, in the heaven of his mind, 
sending illumination and warmth over the whole 
of that Empire. Through his gift of spiritual 
insight, through a belief like that of Socrates in 
his own spirituality, he is enabled to do what 
without such belief he could not do, namely, to 
overleap the gross and palpable of sense, and 
to grasp the key which opens the joyous realm 
where embodied act is not yet, but is ever 
hatching, the upper realm, whence the nobler 
sensibilities receive their polish, the realm mys- 
terious, unfathomable, actively though impalpa- 
bly above, around us, wherewith it is our im- 
measurable privilege to be in close, mystical, 
more or less conscious relation, and in imagi- 
nation, nay, more than in imagination, to enter 



SHAKESPEARE. 1 45 

while still on earth. Herein Shakespeare 
reveled, sharpening by that higher light every 
weapon of his vast mental armory, growing vis- 
ionary with a superlative visionariness, which 
empowered him to divine the thoughts and 
wills of men with a godlike clearness, and with 
a godlike sympathy and charitableness. 

The distinctively human faculties in man 
being the spiritual and moral, only he who is 
largely endowed with these can figure to him- 
self human beings in their wholeness. Had 
Shakespeare not been exceptionally fortified 
with the supreme sensibilities, not only would 
he not have been able to hatch in his mind 
and thence project the nobler among his per- 
sonages, such as Kent, Vincentio, Duke of 
Vienna, Orlando, Antonio, Gonzalo, Imogen, 
Cordelia ; but none of his personages, not the 
lowest, would have moved before us with the 
fullness of being, the springiness of port, we 
now see in them. To measure anything, you 
must have in your thought a standard. To say 
that a man is six feet high, implies that you 
carry within you the conception of a foot. For 
moral measurement you need a moral standard ; 
that is, you must have within you, in full propor- 
tion, the faculties that distinctively constitute a 

10 



1 46 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

human being, the spiritual and moral faculties. 
As, to judge of physical height, your own geo- 
metrical competence supplies you with a guage 
in a foot, so, to judge of moral height, your own 
spiritual competence must supply you with a 
moral foot. For lack of this moral foot, in un- 
confused sensation, it is, that moral judgments 
are often unsubstantial, and that such morally 
deformed idols are at times set up, to be tem- 
porarily worshipped. 

Urged upward by interior want, and carrying 
with him, like cloud-cleaving Chimborazo, suc- 
cessive belts of fertility, the dramatist must 
reach this spiritual height, in order to obtain 
a clear survey of the wide diversified field 
where he desires to work. To this height 
Shakespeare rose with ease ; nay, he habitually 
dwelt thereon ; and hence there is an airy 
buoyancy in all his personages, even the most 
weighty, and in his pages so fine a light. The 
normal state of the poet, as such, is elation, ele- 
vation : when under the spell of the " vision and 
the faculty divine," he is lifted above himself, 
and this vision and faculty become more divine 
when sanctified by spiritual transfiguration. 
The poet's sight grows more transpiercing, his 
touch more luminous ; he is more of a man, 
and works from a higher plane of reality. 



SHAKESPEARE. 1 47 

The sturdy realism of Shakespeare is but 
the solid basis to his lofty structures. Were 
his realism less earthy, he could not build so 
high. The grander the cathedral and the taller 
its spire, the more firmly must it grasp the 
earth with its foundations. Its foundations 
take their shape and proportions from the yet 
unreared grandeurs above them : within its 
stoutest folds the realism of Shakespeare feels 
his spiritualism. His consciousness of the 
cooperative activity and sympathetic helpful- 
ness of the invisible powers, is a mystic and 
an animating influence which works into the 
texture of his personages, imparting to them 
some of that springiness which marks them as 
his. Shakespeare's delight in the marvelous 
is, of itself, an element of depth in him which 
tempers his whole view of life, and which even 
adds a vivacity to the least poetic of his dia- 
logues. Shakespeare is a spiritual earthling, 
" a budded angel graft on clay," an Antaeus, 
who draws strength from the earth ; but unlike 
that giant son of the earth and sea, he loses 
not strength when lifted from the earth : he 
gains strength. As on his immense and mi- 
nutely divided scale of characterization he as- 
cends from the base to the top, the joyous laugh 



1 48 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

of the earthling becomes the benignant smile 
of the angel, the muscular grace of the athlete 
is changed to the winged puissance of a de- 
scending Michael. And, like a lucent atmos- 
phere at midday, moulding the earth to joy 
and power, out of the sunny depths of Shake- 
speare's broad being come the breath and light 
of his moral nature, giving warmth and sta- 
bility to details, and to the grander scenes and 
personages their wise significance and lasting 
worth. 



XXI. 

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 

In the "Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare 
pits against each other two of the most irrecon- 
cilable opposites to be found on the fretful mart 
of human passions. Antonio, by lending money 
gratis, has hindered Shylock of half a million, 
which is daily to tap an artery of Shylock' s 
life : that life is all run into love of gain. For 
this life-tapping, Shylock would, with his own 
hand, cut out the heart of Antonio. 

In the conflicts of business and ambition two 
competitors often baffle one the other, without 
being unlike, at times indeed even from very 
likeness. But the intercrossings of such two 
would furnish a less capable subject for pictur- 
esque dramatic representation. In the case of 
Antonio and Shylock a deep moral difference 
underlies the mutual antagonism. Shakespeare 
dramatically needed the diversity, the oppug- 
nancy, and so, as is his profound wont, he sec- 
onds his infallible artistic instinct with moral 
conditions, sinking, as nature does, into the in- 



1 5 O BRIEF ESS A VS. 

most being the roots of the variegated flowers 
he has made to bloom on the surface. Had An- 
tonio come to Venice as a visitor, and fallen but 
casually in contact with Shylock, and not as 
a constant counterworker, between the two, 
even had they both been Christians or both 
Jews, would have arisen a mutual instinctive 
repulsion, the one being generous, kindly, liv- 
ing much out of himself, carrying an open 
heart that is ever opening his purse : the other 
hard, morose from penuriousness, a griping 
usurer, who would use every man as so much 
capital, funded for his benefit, from which his 
own shrewdness was to draw dividends. 

With his veracious perception of the actual- 
ities of life, and his masterly artistic handiness 
in harmonizing contrasts, Shakespeare at times 
includes in one frame Comedy and Tragedy. 
To tragedy death is not necessary ; and there 
are catastrophes which to the victim would have 
been lightened by decease. The moral (in the 
high sense) may not demand the extinction 
even of a towering transgressor, and the pro- 
portions of Art may forbid it ; but that to him 
death would have been, not a penalty, but a 
release, reveals a deeply tragic element. Such 
there is in the " Merchant of Venice." Had 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 151 

suicide been a crime to which Jews are ad- 
dicted, instead of being one from which they re- 
coil with peculiar aversion, Shylock might have 
turned his whetted knife upon himself with as 
much justification as do Brutus and Othello 
their swords ; and, when overwhelmed by the 
sentence of the judge, and goaded by the 
taunts of the bystanders, he might have had 
the grim satisfaction of spattering with his 
blood the triumphant circle of Christian mock- 
ers. 

Daily life offers many a group where, as in the 
" Merchant of Venice/' in the midst of a light 
laughing company a tragic figure moves and 
errs and suffers, and where often his suffering 
casts as little of gloom as Shylock' s did upon 
those about him. Hereby the tragic is deep- 
ened. Total refusal of sympathy, absolute is- 
olation, aggravates the tragic condition, even 
though Shylock himself, from his unsympa- 
thetic habits, feels the isolation but partially. 

Shylock is a peremptory representative, ac- 
credited by the sovereign, Shakespeare. The 
story of the Hebrew people, for two thousand 
years ever struck down, but never subdued, 
scorned, persecuted, but never weakened, never 
disheartened, this is the most loaded tragedy 



152 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

of History, a tragedy whose scenes are cen- 
turies, whose acts are the epochs of civilization, 
whose stage is the globe. Happily closed now 
is its last act, the ban against this remarkable 
people being lifted by the growth of moral 
culture in Christendom. The hard stern side 
in this excommunicated life of a people, Shake- 
speare has condensed into Shylock. Shylock 
leaves the court-room baffled, impoverished, 
cruelly mocked, but unbowed. His was not a 
spirit to be subjugated by man. 

The heartlessness and levity of Jessica are 
to some a blemish on the beauty of this play. 
But Shakespeare, a rigorous realist, saw men 
and women as they are, idealizing each chosen 
specimen, not by smoothing its prominences 
with the false aim of academical impotence, but 
by unfolding each to its utmost in the light of 
poetic vision, — the only genuine idealization. 
By the absence of all sentiment in her smile- 
less home, the natural superficiality of Jessica 
has been cultivated. Being unlike her father 
— as so many children are — the unlikeness, 
in the absence of all generous concession on 
his part (and children are particularly attached 
by generosity), grew to indifference to him, and, 
in the absence in her of earnestness of char- 



THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. I 53 

acter, turns to dislike of his absorbing passion, 
and to frivolous contempt for its object. One 
of the curses of miserhood is its proneness to 
envelop its victim in a dark loneliness, even 
amid the household lights of affection. Around 
Shylock this gloom is deepened by the unfilial 
conduct of his only child, of which unfilial con- 
duct his unparental conduct was partly the 
cause; while the unlikeness between the two 
heightens the play of contrasts, which is a 
characteristic of this brilliant drama. 



XXII. 

TAMING OF THE SHREW. 

Our world teems with materials for poetry. 
Wherever there is life, poetic aspects are to be 
won. Under every life-current which has depth 
to float a literary venture, there lie unrevealed 
treasures and gems, which only genius has the 
vision and the vigor to perceive and dive for, 
and which such genius joyfully seizes, and then 
holds up in the sun of admiration, dripping 
with beauty. To do this is the token of genial 
power, and if to the gift of poetic sensibility be 
added though tfulness and strength, ft cannot 
but be done. 

These fresh revelations of life and beauty 
may be called the nervous centres of a literary 
organism, the ganglia which concentrate and 
distribute motive force ; and according to their 
number, potency, and fineness, is :he organic 
vitality of the work and its elevaton, on the 
scale of aesthetic originality. At passages thus 
vitalized, the reader is arrested, to be warmed 
by the flame they kindle within hin. Any one 



TAMING OF THE SHREW. 155 

capable of poetic sympathy, can in a moment 
experience this animating warmth by opening 
" Hamlet," or " As You Like It." These two 
first occur to us because their subjects, being 
especially congenial to Shakespeare, they fill to 
its fullest his mind, which richly overflows, and 
deposits its wealth with as much ease and 
abundance as the Nile does its annual gift of 
fertility. You can hardly read twenty lines 
anywhere, without pausing to delight in some 
sparkling jewel set in the golden page. Now, 
of these gems of thought, sentiment, and ex- 
pression, none are to be met with in the " Tam- 
ing of the Shrew." Thence we conclude that 
this comedy is the work of the playwright 
Shakespeare, and not of the poet. Shakespeare, 
the greatest poet of the world, was also the 
greatest playwright. As the principal pro- 
prietor of a theatre, he made it one of his func- 
tions to keep his stage refreshed with new 
pieces. It was a dramatic age. Dramatic writ- 
ers seem to have freely used the works of their 
predecessors, and even of their contemporaries. 
Collier thinks it is evident that, in writing the 
" Taming of the Shrew," Shakespeare made 
great use of a previous comedy called " Taming 
of a Shrew." A most skillful playwright, Shake- 
speare well knew how to tighten loose knots, 



1 5 6 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

to give a logical sequence to scenes, to put in 
touches characteristic or sprightly, and to bind 
the dialogue in that chain of vivacity, wrought 
in his wondrously vivid mind. To find a good 
subject ready dramatized, which by his ma- 
nipulation would be made more buoyant and 
compact, was doubtless a godsend to the prac- 
tical Shakespeare. He could thus, in two or 
three weeks, turn out a play that would draw 
as much into the treasury of the company, as 
one of his orginal dramas that cost him three 
or four months' work. That the " Taming of 
the Shrew" is only thus secondarily Shake- 
speare's, we infer from its almost total want in 
passages of poetic glow, such as in his other 
comedies shoot up, with more or less frequency, 
like jets of transparent fire. 

A partial exception must be made for the 
speech of Catherine at the close of the play, 
the speech beginning " Fie, fie." Here is no 
occasion for glow ; but what a sparkle there is 
of intellectual vivacity. This is all Shake- 
speare's. What a propontic flow in the cur- 
rent, showing, from its depth and volume, that 
there is a deep capacious sea behind it. And 
how thoroughly is the long speech saved from 
didactic tedium by the figurative luminousness 
in which its counsel is enwreathed. 



XXIIL 

THE TEMPEST. 

Each play of Shakespeare has its character, 
as each of his personages has his or her in- 
dividuality. When by Shakespeare a subject 
was taken up, its quality and the chief agents 
that give it consistence moulded the plan, and 
determined the nature and tone of the drama 
to be evolved. This seems to me his process. 
He did not select a subject directly for the pur- 
pose of exhibiting characteristics in individuals, 
or the effects of certain courses ; but he set in 
motion the men and women who belong to a 
given circle of events, and, through their rela- 
tions to one another, and to the end to which 
pointed their individualities, and the interplay 
of these, he shaped their combination into an 
organic whole. So versed was Shakespeare in 
the possibilities of human conjunctions and 
catastrophes, so deep in the confidence of the 
human heart, his imagination was so free and 
potent, that he had but to bring together the 
individuals who belonged to the chosen subject, 



I58 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

and give them impulse from his own mighty 
being, and they, like their fellows in actual 
life, would work out a healthy moral, and, 
under the guidance of his aesthetic genius, 
present a rounded whole, as symmetrical in 
shape as it was lively in action and profound 
in import. 

That this was the procedure of Shakespeare, 
is transparent on his page ; and it was his 
because it is that of nature. In man the feel- 
ings are the primary power : the intellect is 
their instrument. The weal and life of the 
body is not more bound to the warmth of the 
heart that pulsates at its core, than is the per- 
sonality of the man to his desires and aspira- 
tions : they build his character. The artist 
who would rival nature, must make the hearts 
of his personages beat sadly or joyfully, as the 
conditions may impose, but distinctly, ener- 
getically. For this he needs have within him- 
self a warm, strong throb, that tunes itself with 
a ready love to the varied moods of humanity ; 
and therewith a poetic ear that seizes the music 
in each. To construct characters in order to 
exhibit certain phases of doing or suffering, 
and with the understanding to plan all the 
movements and control them to a given end, 



THE TEMPEST. 1 59 

this being counter to nature's method, will re- 
sult, not in art but in artificiality, not in poetry, 
but in mechanism. The initiative is with the 
feelings, not with the intellect. In the drama, 
especially, the story growing out of the char- 
acters (in the epic the story governs the agents), 
these drive, so to speak, the events before 
them. For this, of course, they must be vig- 
orously and warmly conceived, and so con- 
joined, so harmonized and contrasted, as to 
build by their action and reaction a whole at 
once picturesque and real. In the constructive 
function, in the handling of the materials fur- 
nished by the heart as well as those furnished 
by itself, the intellectual constituent of art 
finds one of its fields ; and here the judgment 
of Shakespeare approves itself equal to his 
aesthetic susceptibility. 

A deaf mute might give evidence of great 
intellect by the way in which he conducts him- 
self and directs others ; but besides action, 
which its name implies, the drama asks for 
talk. It is in the profoundness and keenness, 
the range and subtlety, the solidity and splendor 
of his talk, that Shakespeare exhibits again, in 
unequaled degree and harmony, the union of 
sensibility with intelligence. His talk is at 



1 60 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

once more natural and more ideal, at once more 
unprompted and more logically affiliated, than 
can elsewhere be read. The intellectual ac- 
tivity among his interlocutors is higher, more 
brilliant and better sustained than among any 
other talkers of whom we have record. 

Of all Shakespeare's plays " The Tempest" 
may perhaps be deemed the most intellectual, in 
this sense, that having of course, a deep basis 
of feeling, the personages, their passions and 
aims, all cooperate to a triumphal pomp of in- 
tellectual power. In this wonderful poem the 
poet plays the god. He controls the elements, 
and creates living, speaking beings, the like of 
whom had not before been known on the earth. 
The raising and stilling of the storm, the mas- 
tery over the minds of the ship's inmates, this 
is the magnificent apparatus of the poem, sym- 
bolical of mental might. In Prospero is imag- 
inatively displayed the power to be attained 
by intellectual culture and spiritual elevation, 
with self-devotion to high ends. But Caliban 
and Ariel are new creatures, not our fellows, 
like Iago and Imogen. They are sub- and 
super-humanities, sprung from a brain which, 
in the momentum of its imaginative sweep, and 
the intensity of its creative vis, swings beyond 



THE TEMPEST. l6l 

the known circle of nature, but, still intuitively- 
obedient to her laws, gives birth to beings who 
are within the pale of nature, while outside 
that of earthly humanity. 

Caliban, above the brutes, in that he has the 
use of speech and a broader intelligence, is yet 
below the upper class of them ; for Prospero 
says he will " take no print of goodness," and is 
one " whom stripes may move, not kindness ; " 
and Caliban himself declares that all the profit 
he has of language is that he " knows how to 
curse." Caliban is not unhuman, for he has no 
quality that human beings have not ; he is 
dfchuman, that is, a being from whom the dis- 
tinctively human has been subtracted. He 
wears in his head the precious jewel of intel- 
lect, but this is not irradiated by light from the 
spiritual and moral faculties, nor even by that 
from the upper reason, and hence it sparkles 
not, but is dimmed by fumes that are ever 
rising from the animal abyss. Fancy the 
horse and the dog endowed with as much un- 
derstanding as Caliban to guide their selfish- 
ness, and with a corresponding capacity of 
speech ; then, instead of affectionate, faithful, 
subordinate servants, we should have in them 
self-seeking, treacherous, cruel rivals. All Cali- 



1 62 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

ban's joys and pains are of the flesh, and his 
fears do not reach beyond pinches and cramps. 
For the joy of drink he will make Stephano 
king, and be his slave. And here Caliban steps 
back into the pale of humanity. How many 
a man enacts Caliban, making himself the slave 
of appetite and passion, shutting out the upper 
light of which he has more or less within him 
(and of which poor Caliban had no glimmer), 
thus exiling himself from the beauties and 
beatitudes of life, and stifling his whole being 
into a self-built dungeon. 

One of the preeminences of Shakespeare is 
this, that a trait or act, struck out of the in- 
dividuality of the scene and personages, is dis- 
covered to be symbolical, at once specific and 
generic. Shakespeare did not say to himself, 
" Here is an occasion to embody a generality, 
to put forth in individual form what shall be 
a telling illustration of common human weak- 
ness." Not in the least. With his profound 
insight into being, with his vivacity of wit as 
well as of scenic movement, he drew Caliban 
to the life. An unbroken consanguinity binds 
into palpitating oneness the world of man, all 
its complexities and diversities ; and such is 
the depth and fullness of Shakespeare's intu- 



THE TEMPEST. 1 63 

ition, that a fidelity of detail like this lets a 
didactic type shine through itself. If you wish 
to show the grace of a beautiful young girl, 
you do not say to her, " My dear, walk across 
the room, that my friend may see how graceful 
you are ; " that would somewhat mar your very 
purpose ; but you send her across the room 
on an errand, and as she executes the small 
commission, she unconsciously displays a grace 
that would ravish the sense of beholding mul- 
titudes. 

In the brain of Shakespeare, thoughts, the 
broadest and deepest, spring up spontaneously : 
they come to him he knows not how or whence, 
and gleaming out of upper spheres they yet 
fit an ordinary fact or motion, suddenly illu- 
minating it, — thoughts high, subtle, imagina- 
tive, yet apt to the matter, abstractions that 
yet glow with a familiar light. A common- 
place is sometimes enlivened by being turned 
by him into a far-reaching generality. 

Shakespeare digs into the earth for Caliban. 
Caliban is steeped in sense. With roots deep 
under ground, he is but a stump of humanity, 
a growth suddenly truncated, and so without 
foliage or fruit. He has sensation and some 
understanding, but no aspiration, no con- 



164 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

science, no wide discourse of reason. Ariel 
springs from the other pole : in him we have 
a glimpse of what man will be when disbur- 
dened of his body. He is not unhuman : he 
is unbodied, and thence is superhuman only 
in the sense that he is above man in being 
exempt from the physical obstructions of flesh. 
The secret of the being and individuality both 
of Ariel and of Caliban lies, in the subtraction 
from normal human beings of some of their 
attributes. In Caliban the higher human, the 
spiritual and moral, have been subtracted ; in 
Ariel, the wants and the cumbrance of the 
body. The one is the type of the earthy, 
material and gross, the other of the immaterial 
and subtile ; and yet, neither has any quality 
or faculty not in human nature. No moral or 
intellectual quality, not in human nature, can 
be conceived by the mind of man. Any at- 
tempt to shape a being with extrahuman quali- 
ties, would end in nonsense. Soar as it will 
hundreds of millions of leagues into space, 
the imagination cannot exceed its humanity : 
to this it is bound by a thread that never 
snaps ; at the utmost reaches of its flight, it 
will find no creature but of its creating. 

The most of his subjects and plots, Shake- 



THE TEMPEST l6$ 

speare took from printed tales, or legends, or 
other plays. " The Tempest M is one of the 
few that has not been tracked to any of these 
sources. Collier turned over the leaves of 
every Italian novelist anterior to the age of 
Shakespeare, but found no trace of the inci- 
dents of " The Tempest." On the far confines 
of his imaginative range, Shakespeare may 
have espied some dim nucleus, which at once 
began to sparkle under his gaze, and which, 
fed on the stores of his invention, so throve, 
that it grew into " The Tempest." " The Tem- 
pest " is a translucent splendor, hung between 
earth and heaven, a glittering crystalline prism, 
through which from the Shakesperian sun shoot 
fiery beams, in their many-colored brilliancy, 
flashing onward forever, to glorify and animate 
the minds that are so blest as to come within 
their play. Here Shakespeare substantiates, 
with exceptional distinctness, his theory of 
poetic creation : — 

" The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
And as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name ; n 



l66 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

and ever, even in the finest frenzy, keeping not 
only within the bounds of truth, but seizing 
and embodying the very essence and beauty 
of truth. This infallible truthfulness it is that 
constitutes Shakespeare's poetic greatness, his 
supreme literary elevation. None but the poet 
can know the whole truth, and when, as with 
Shakespeare, there is a unique completeness 
of endowment, the range is thereby so wide, 
so universal, that the poetic vision falls crea- 
tively on all kinds of incidents, interests, pas- 
sions, casting illumination, and making the 
truth flash out, wherever it falls. 

How Shakespeare clings to, hugs the matter 
in hand, with what a quickening virtue he 
transfuses himself into the scene and person- 
ages, so enlivening reality with poetic breath, 
that it seems more alive than actual fact, is in 
no scene that he drew more manifest than in 
the opening of " The Tempest," — the storm 
at sea brought before our eyes by the words 
and bearing of the crew and the passengers. 
The naturalness and fidelity conceal the art. 
In the next scene, where the storm is repeated 
in the report of it made to Prospero by his 
agent Ariel, Shakespeare out-Shakespeare's 
himself. 



XXIV. 

MACBETH. 

Between Macbeth and his wife the murder 
of King Duncan was projected before the open- 
ing of the tragedy. In the last scene of Act 
L, when Macbeth, seemingly relenting of his 
bloody purpose, exclaims, in answer to Lady 
Macbeth' s scornful reproaches, 

" I dare do all that may become a man 
Who dares do more is none/' 

she rejoins, 

" What beast was't, then, 
That made you break this enterprise to me ? 

Nor time, nor place 

Did then adhere, and yet you would make both : 
They've made themselves, and that their fitness now 
Doth unmake you/' 

This cannot possibly refer to any interview 
between them since Macbeth's return home, 
for ever since his arrival, time and place do 
adhere, Macbeth having just preceded Dun- 
can, who " coursed him at the heels," in their 
way to Inverness. Observe, in passing, the 



1 68 BRIEF ESSA VS. 

friendly, affectionate, and yet kingly greeting 
of Duncan to Lady Macbeth, and the delicate 
compliment when he tells her that he had pur- 
posed being before Macbeth, — 

" But he rides well, 
And his great love, sharp as his spur, hath holp him 
To his home before us/' 

This is a sample of that deep serene natural- 
ness, which is one of the fascinations of Shake- 
speare, and at the same time of his breadth of 
treatment, his divine power of grasping a whole 
in all its complexity and the significance of its 
detail. This gentle confiding greeting of the 
king, what a foreground it is to the murder 
that is just behind it, blackening unseen the 
heart of the hostess he greets. Of the same 
kind is, at the opening of this scene, the speech 
of Banquo about "the temple-haunting mart- 
let." The poetry is not all in the thought and 
exquisite execution of the passage ; some of 
it is in putting such a passage just there. 

The words, "nor time nor place did then 
adhere ; " that is, when Macbeth first broke 
his project to Lady Macbeth, point necessarily 
to a period anterior to the opening scene of 
the play, ere Macbeth had gone to the field at 



MACBETH. 169 

the head of the king's forces. This is clear : 
these words can have no other meaning. 

Now, go back to the third scene, and note 
the effect on Macbeth when Banquo and he 
are waylaid by the three Witches. These greet 
him with the triple title of Glamis, Cawdor, 
and king that shall be. What that effect is 
we learn from the exclamation of Banquo : — 

" Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear 
Things that do sound so fair ? " 

Startled by the Witches' words, because they 
suddenly reveal the murderous secret in his 
bosom, Macbeth " seems rapt withal." While 
Banquo is questioning the hags, he recovers 
himself, and then the hopes that had made him 
conceive the murder return to him, freshened 
and deepened by the flattering disclosures of 
the witches. Eagerly he questions them, and 
is sorely disappointed when, without further 
speech, they vanish. The whole bearing of 
Macbeth denotes a foregone conclusion. 

Now mark how he becomes still more deeply 
rapt when a few moments later he meets Rosse 
and Angus, sent by the king " to give thee 
from our royal master thanks," and they, greet- 
ing him as thane of Cawdor, so far confirm the 
outgivings of the Witches. Then we have that 



1 70 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

picture of the guilty self-questioning heart, one 
of those gorgeous passages, gold-embossed, and 
thicker studded than is usual even in Shake- 
speare, with sparkling jewels. Here he toys 
with the murder that is in his mind, though 
it makes his heart to knock at his ribs. A 
bloody gigantic crime does not, in a nature 
like Macbeth's, if in any nature, grow suddenly 
into ripeness for execution. The " supernatural 
soliciting " which at first shakes Macbeth, soon 
strengthens him, and the murderous plot, long 
before conceived, and which nearly slept, is 
reawakened, and reawakened into stronger 
light, as may be inferred from his speech in 
the next scene on leaving the king, who 
has just proclaimed Malcolm successor to the 
throne. 

Let us now, outriding both Macbeth and 
King Duncan, reach Inverness in time to hear 
Lady Macbeth read the letter from her hus- 
band, and comment thereon. And first we ask, 
in the tenor and tone of that letter and in 
its brevity, is there not something taken for 
granted ? But if the letter itself does not, 
surely the comment on it does, point to a 
foregone conclusion. Not a moment does she 
stop to consider the wonder of the revelation, 



MACBETH. 171 

but instantly on closing the letter, without 
pause, she exclaims : — 

" Glamis thou art, and Cawdor ; and shalt be 
What thou art promised/' 

Most evidently the prospect here opened to 
her is no new one, but one which she was 
accustomed to look at. Had the thought of 
the crown been now first presented to her 
mind, how could it leap instantly, at one bound, 
to the great crime of assassination ? This were 
out of nature. Moreover, how hardened by 
guilty imaginations, how steeped already in 
murder, by brooding on the nest of ambition, 
must be the heart that could prompt that ap- 
palling soliloquy, uttered the instant after she 
learns that Duncan is coming, and within five 
minutes after reading the letter : — 

" The raven himself is hoarse, 
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
Under my battlements/ 7 

And when, at the end of that soliloquy, Mac- 
beth enters, with a burst of hellish joy she 
greets him, which he answers with, — 

" My dearest love, 

Duncan comes here to-night. 
Lady Macbeth. And when goes hence ? 

Macbeth. To-morrow as he purposes. 

Lady M. Oh never 

Shall sun that morrow see.'' 



I J2 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

In the first Act, every time that Macbeth 
and Lady Macbeth appear, whether they be 
together, or alone, or in contact with others, 
each scene corroborates the preceding one in 
showing that the murder of the King was a 
project that had been entertained, and, in the 
minds of both, determined on, before the open- 
ing of the drama. When in the fifth scene, 
just after Lady Macbeth has read the letter, 
an attendant enters, and in answer to her in- 
quiry, tl What is your tidings ? " answers, " The 
King comes here to night," her passionate ex- 
clamation, " Thou'rt mad to say it," is the out- 
flashing of her joy that at once, within a few 
hours, by this happy circumstance, can be 
consummated the deed, 

" Which shall to all our nights and days to come 
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom." 

More in harmony is it with the habitual far- 
reaching forethought of Shakespeare, that this 
great tragedy, built on ambition, and the dark, 
more deliberate desires of mature life, should 
have its foundations laid solidly in the being 
of its two unflinching movers. By him effects 
are never presented unbacked by correspond- 
ing and sufficient causes. Shakespeare always 
sends down roots, strong and deep in propor- 



MACBETH. I73 

tion to the breadth and weight of the deeds 
they underlie and feed. The prophetic and 
loving interpreter of the human heart could 
not wrong and trifle with it, by making it im- 
provise a gigantic crime. 

This throwing of the murderous inception 
back beyond the time when the play opens, 
gives to the Witches their proper place. If 
Macbeth had not for some time carried the 
murder in his mind, then the seed was planted 
there by the greeting of the Witches when he 
first meets them on the heath, and they, bidden 
by him to speak, hail him as king that shall be. 
But that this was not the first seed, we know 
positively from Lady Macbeth's taunts in the 
seventh scene. And, had we not this convin- 
cing external evidence, ought we not to infer, 
from psychological causes, that it was not so ? 
Would Shakespeare make a hag's prophetic 
hail the pivot upon which this whole tragic 
drama turns ? More in consonance is it with 
the resources and the mysterious initiative of 
the human heart, to make the mind of Macbeth 
primary, and the Witches secondary in the 
forecasting of the murder. The Witches are 
a fantastic embodiment of the grosser human 
desires, of evil possibilities. Macbeth has con- 



174 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

ceived the murder, and these stand for the foul 
wishes, the black purposes that made him con- 
ceive it. The Witches are low, squalid, of the 
earth, most earthy, who burrow into the darkest 
and foulest fancies for ingredients for their 
hell-broth. They are an echo to the selfish 
aims of Macbeth, who is cajoled and flattered 
by them, just as we all are liable to be by car- 
nal lusts and selfish wills and unhallowed am- 
bitions. They suddenly fan into a blaze the 
fire that lay smouldering in Macbeth's heart. 
Our evil desires ever seize us in moments of 
weakness. That with all their earthiness they 
are unearthly, gives them a poetic efficacy, 
Shakespeare availing himself of the popular 
belief in evil spirits to make the instinct of the 
marvelous aid him in his high purpose. 

The Witches open the tragedy with only a 
few lines, but these so significant that they are 
an overture to the whole play. Entering in 
thunder and lightning, they are met to appoint 
another meeting on the heath, " There to meet 
with Macbeth ." In the thoughts of Macbeth 
is an embryo murder: their function is, so 
skillfully to feed the embryo, that it shall 
quickly come to maturity in act. Before van- 
ishing, all the three unite in two lines indica- 



MACBETH. 175 

tive of their work and of the moral medium in 
which they do it, — 

" Fair is foul, and foul is fair : 
Hover through the fog and filthy air." 

Macbeth, the stronger nature, has the initia- 
tive. He first broke the murder to his wife, as 
she avers in Scene 7 of Act I. The thought 
thus lodged in her mind, ambition and sympa- 
thy with her husband secretly nursed, imagi- 
nation feeding it so succulently, that at the 
first vent offered, it rushes out full grown on 
receipt of the prophetic letter ; and when, a 
few moments later, she learns that on that very 
night Duncan will be under her roof, so familiar 
and vivid had become the image, that mentally 
she commits the murder, and to her over- 
wrought mind Duncan's death is as good as 
accomplished. More impulsive than Macbeth, 
holding the near and present more closely in 
her woman's intense one-sided view, while he 
takes a wider range and can weigh the pros 
and cons, she is enabled to spur him up to the 
mark when he falters. 

In awful prominence and significance stands 
out the moral of this great poem. How the 
crime, once committed, swallows up the whole 
being of the two criminals : its absorbing om- 



1 76 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

nipresence isolates each of them. In planning 
and doing the murder, what intimate union : 
each could then help the other. Now they can 
help each other no more ; each is thrown upon 
the sheer individuality of each, left alone with 
his or her soul. Macbeth hardens, Lady Mac- 
beth breaks. The masculine nature braces 
itself to tougher sinew, to bloodier doing ; the 
feminine fibre relaxes and gives way. Macbeth 
keeps alone, restless, possessed as it were with 
the demon of murder. Even when talking 
with his wife he soliloquizes. This continuous 
introspection, this unquiet abstractedness of 
Macbeth, is an exhibition of Shakespeare's 
insight, of his aesthetic mastery, unsurpassed 
even by himself. 

This tragedy is a sonorous sublime reverber- 
ation, from the mighty brain of Shakespeare, 
of the protesting cry of nature and conscience 
against murder, against 

"The deep damnation of his taking off." 

With what fearful vividness is the crime de- 
picted by the words and scenes which immedi- 
ately precede the act, by the awful first effect 
on Macbeth of the commission, and by the 
accumulating train of terrible consequences ! 
Before the dread features of the picture, the 
mind recoils in consternation. 



XXV. 

HAMLET. 

There is ground for believing that Shake- 
speare worked at " Hamlet " during several 
years. Not that Shakespeare was for several 
years exclusively busy in writing " Hamlet ; " but 
that the first draft was at intervals gradually 
matured and expanded until the last hand was 
put to it in 1604. Defective or questionable is, 
in most cases, external evidence as to the life 
and doings of Shakespeare ; but accumulated in- 
ternal evidence proves that the author of " Ham- 
let " wrought upon this play more than upon any 
other. " Hamlet " is the longest of his dramas, 
and at the same time the most compressed ; its 
scenes are more numerous than in any other of 
his great tragedies, and yet, in none other will 
you find so many scenes throbbing with life and 
significance. While for animation, apposite- 
ness, progressiveness, the dialogue is through- 
out unsurpassed, there is a larger number of 
single speeches and soliloquies of Shakespearian 
depth and comprehensiveness. " Hamlet " con- 
12 



1 78 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

tains more variety and more incident, together 
with a wider range of reason and experience, 
than any other drama ; more pregnant thoughts, 
more sentences of condensed wisdom, more 
tender buds of beauty to expand through all the 
seasons of time ; such profuseness in separable 
individualities of intellect and power, that the 
play would be overcharged with them, were 
there not in the substance out of which they 
spring, and which they beautify, such depth 
and breadth and warmth and meaning, that 
they are borne up buoyantly and gracefully, 
so that the pages look no more over-crowded 
than do the heavens with the countless stars 
they carry in their interminable spaces. 

All these divers characteristics combine to 
prove that the greatest tragedy and poem of 
Shakespeare, and of literature, was the product 
of more than usual labor and deliberation, and 
that, should external evidence fail to make cer- 
tain that Shakespeare had " Hamlet" in hand five 
or six years, we are authorized by these many 
internal marks, supported as they are by pretty 
well established dates, to infer that he wrought 
at it during at least three or four. It is the 
work upon which, more than upon any other, he 
concentrates himself, into which he puts more 



HAMLET, I79 

of himself, when at his best, and which thence 
becomes the most consummate product of his 
genius and of his judgment, the ripest and 
richest fruit of the most poetic human soul 
that ever was, the favorite of one who, of the 
priceless gifts of feeling and intellect had more 
to give than any other poet, and who here 
lavished them, pouring upon " Hamlet " in the 
ecstasy of creativeness, from the deeps of a 
profound soul and from the folds of a vast 
intellect, his fairest stores of thought and 
emotion. 

The most necessary passions of the heart 
are loaded with inextinguishable fire, which 
may explode in lurid bursts, to rend and con- 
sume the possessor, or may burn smoothly, for 
the warmth and delight of his being. The story 
in u Hamlet " involves them all, all the great 
primary loves, the parental, the filial, the fra- 
ternal, the conjugal ; and each and every one 
of them is baffled, wronged, wounded, scathed. 
The complicated violence done to one and all 
the chief personages, drawing on the poet's 
highest resources, swells to its utmost his crea- 
tive power, and thence so fills with urgent life 
every part and page, that in " Hamlet " there are 
almost no merely conjunctive passages. The 



1 80 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

heat at the core carries the drama along with a 
momentum that keeps the continuity unrelaxed 
thus rendering unnecessary those transition 
scenes, some of which can hardly be dispensed 
with even in the most compact and rapid dra- 
matic evolution. Fullness of life there is al- 
ways in Shakespeare : its brimming excess 
causes Hamlet to excel in what is a cardinal 
power of Shakespeare, and is a token of the 
finest and largest mental wealth, namely, the 
typical quality of thoughts and sentiments, and 
of personages, these combining vital individu- 
ality with generic breadth, to a degree almost 
surpassing even his usual achievement in com- 
passing this great virtue of dramatic charac- 
terization. 

Genuine idealization, that is, exaltation, 
through poetic insight and visionary grasp, 
with adherence to nature through fullest sym- 
pathy with all the promptings of the human 
heart, this, a characteristic of Shakespeare in 
all his dramatic work, especially in contrast 
with his dramatic contemporaries, is in his 
highest tragedies exhibited in its supreme 
phase. In Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, 
there is what, without rant, might be called 
colossal idealization. The agonies undergone 



HAMLET. l8l 

affect us so inordinately because, besides their 
deep truth to nature, the strong hearts that 
suffer throb with the pulse of the inordinate 
intellectual power imparted to them by the 
poet. If Hamlet did not say such great things 
he would long since have been dismissed from 
our intimacy. And the Ghost : with what a 
grand individuality he presents himself! A 
specific personality, what a towering figure he 
is. 

Did it ever occur to the reader that in the 
greatest tragedy, the greatest poem of litera- 
ture, a ghost, " the majesty of buried Den- 
mark," is the principal personage ? Prince 
Hamlet the chief actor in the scenes, the 
protagonist of the play, is the agent of the 
Ghost. Without the Ghost there had been no 
Hamlet. The Ghost not only reveals to Ham- 
let the murder, but prompts, nay, commands 
him to avenge it, and thus controls the whole 
action and development of the play. And 
note how Shakespeare shields this great ghost 
from the common charge against ghosts, that 
they are diseased subjectivities, the coinage of 
the seer's brain, not objective realities. He 
first brings him into the presence of the two 
sentinels, Bernardo and Marcellus, and makes 



1 82 BRIEF ESS A VS. 

him stalk twice before them. When these tell 
Horatio what they have seen, he answers, 'tis 
but their fantasy. Horatio, the calm, philo- 
sophical friend of the prince, chosen by Ham- 
let as his confidential intimate, because in him 

" The blood and judgment are so well commingled," 

he was just the man to dissipate an illusion ; 
and so, at the entreaty of Marcellus, he comes 
to the platform before the palace, with them, 
" to watch the minutes of the night." When 
there, as they seat themselves, that Marcellus 
may again " assail his ears " with what they 
two nights have seen, Horatio exclaims, 
" Tush, tush ! Twill not appear." A few mo- 
ments after he trembles, pale with fear and 
wonder, for the Ghost does appear ; and as if 
to make assurance doubly sure, after an inter- 
val of five or six minutes, reenters, that all 
three, seeing him once more together, may 
harbor no doubt of his visible reality. 

To Hamlet they report what they have seen, 
and nowhere in Shakespeare is there dialogue 
more vital and springy, nowhere more of that 
bound and rebound in the quick interchange of 
thought and word between the speakers, which 
is almost an exclusive property of Shakespeare. 
Hamlet earnestly prays them not to reveal " this 



HAMLET. 183 

sight." Secrecy could have been more surely 
attained by the Ghost's appearing to none but 
to Hamlet. But then the Ghost would have 
been chargeable with unsubstantiality, with 
unreality, with being a phantom of Hamlet's 
morbid troubled mind, and the ghostly element, 
now so impressive, would have been reduced in 
grandeur. Shakespeare was as consummate 
in artistic judgment as he was profound and 
true in aesthetic insight. When Horatio and 
the others are gone, Hamlet exclaims : — 

" My father's spirit in arms I all is not well : 
I doubt some foul play ; " 

thus giving voice to a strong irrepressible in- 
stinct of the universal human heart. 

In the interview between the Ghost and 
Hamlet, what is first to be noted is the natural- 
ness of the Ghost. To the sentinels and Ho- 
ratio he had shown himself bodily as he was on 
earth, so that they knew him at sight. In his 
speech to Hamlet he presents himself alive 
with all the feelings of the earthly man still 
fresh upon him. Nor should we think harshly 
of him, that he prompts Hamlet to slay the 
adulterate incestuous beast who had murdered 
him. In this case to revenge was to do justice, 
which could in no other way be done. Hamlet 



1 84 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

beholds and listens to his father as he had 
known him two months before, only magnified, 
hallowed, by being transferred from the world 
of earth to the world of spirit. Nowhere in 
Shakespeare are words more alive than those 
uttered by the Ghost. It is as if there was more 
undiluted soul in them because the speaker 
is free of the hindrances of flesh. The picture 
of his state, the description of the seduction 
of the Queen, of the poisoning, how clear, 
how actual, how transparent, how concise. In 
Shakespeare — and it is one of the features of 
his greatness — the more intense the action of 
his mind, from the earnestness, warmth, and 
importance of the utterance, the more sure is 
there to be illustration, and remote illustration, 
which would be harmful arrestation, distracting 
intrusion, were there not such a glow and ra- 
pidity that the reader is helped and not hin- 
dered. Shakespeare's mind in highest action is 
so abounding, that it seems obliged to relieve 
itself from the pressure of thoughtful impor- 
tunity. The increased momentum enlarges 
his orbit, and in his fiery course he whirls 
into his vortex new satellites. Thus when the 
Ghost hints at the secrets of his prison-house, 
and says, but that he is forbid to tell them, — 



HAMLET. 185 

" I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word 
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, 
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, 
Thy knotted and combined locks to part, 
And each particular hair to stand on end, 
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine ." 

A few lines further Hamlet exclaims : — 

" Haste me to know it, that I, with wings as swift 
As meditation, or the thoughts of love, 
May sweep to my revenge. ,, 

Who but Shakespeare could, at such a mo- 
ment, without disturbance, bring to the mind 
of the reader or listener thoughts of love ? The 
Ghost answers : — 

"I find thee apt; 
And duller should 'st thou be than the fat weed 
That rots itself in ease 071 Lethe wharf 
Wouldst thou not stir in this. " 

Again, in depicting the seduction of the Queen, 
he pauses to lay before the reader one of those 
golden fruits of meditation, where thought and 
diction marry themselves in a cadency as of 
heavenly harps, which the language garners up 
as one of its brightest, weightiest treasures : — 

" But virtue, as it never will be moved, 
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, 
So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, 
Will sate itself in a celestial bed, 
And prey on garbage." 

In the impartings of the Ghost to Hamlet, 



1 86 BRIEF ESS A YS. 

there is a grandeur, a weightiness, a depth of 
earnestness, that befit the revealments of a 
wronged and murdered king. 

The significance, the awakening impressive- 
ness, the awe of the opening scene in " Ham- 
let," is in fullest keeping with the dread beauty, 
the lustrous depths of Shakespeare's foremost 
drama. What tingling life in every line ! What 
a sudden bursting asunder of the veil between 
the world of sense and the world of spirit! 
In an instant we are translated to realms un- 
earthly. We feel ourselves shuddering in the 
spectral mist which enfolds the Ghost, rapt 
away from earth to spheres untrodden. And 
the latter part of the second scene, what a vivid 
reproduction it is of the first ! 

The best commentators, even Goethe and 
Coleridge, insist that a general moral purpose 
presided at the creation of Hamlet. True it is 
that " We have here an oak planted in a costly 
vase, fit only to receive lovely flowers within 
its bosom ; the roots spread and burst the 
vase." True, that there is in "Hamlet" a want 
of "balance between our attention to the ob- 
jects of our senses and our meditation on the 
workings of our minds/' But that Shakespeare 
wrote " Hamlet" to " exemplify the moral neces- 



HAMLET. 187 

sity " of such a balance, as Coleridge believes ; 
or that he designed to show the effect of " a 
great deed enjoined on an inferior mind," as 
Goethe affirms, this seems to me to be making 
Shakespeare drive a shaft for the water of 
life into the plain of the mere understanding, 
whence no rich poetic current could gain mo- 
mentum to gush ; a procedure, is it not, — I ask 
in all deference to these two great poets and 
critics, — inconsistent with high aesthetic prin- 
ciples, principles which both of themselves have 
done much to establish by precept as by prac- 
tice. 

If the poet has not within him strong, 
healthy, moral sensibilities to dominate, half 
unconsciously, his whole work, all such purpose 
will be futile and will fail ; and if these sen- 
sibilities be the staple of his being (as they 
must be in a great dramatic poet), the placing 
before himself such purpose will be, not merely 
superfluous, but obstructive and depressive, I 
might almost say, depletive. 

To believe that Shakespeare had primarily 
in his mind a specific moral plan, through which 
he aimed in Hamlet to set forth the operation 
of certain mental compounds, were to make the 
clear-sighted poet put the cart before the horse. 



1 88 BRIEF ESSAYS. 

This, it seems to me, is Shakespeare's pro- 
cedure : He seized upon a theme pregnant with 
passion, capable of impressive presentation, and 
in unfolding the characters that give to such 
a theme its weight and purport, that make it 
indeed possible, he drew them or fed them out 
of his own profound warm intuitions, intuitions 
which had been cultivated and concreted by a 
sure active observation. 

The lowest foundation on which the dra- 
matic edifice is raised is not laid down before- 
hand, but lay ready in the depths of his own 
moral nature, in the same depths whence he 
drew the material for the construction ; just as 
if you were to rear a solid gorgeous palace on 
a mountain of Carara, the compact marble, on 
which the base of the building would rest, 
furnishes the materials for the superstructure. 
In creating Hamlet Shakespeare had no special 
moral aim. In this, as in all his great tragedies, 
there is a deep sound moral, deeper, it may 
be, than in any other, there being in no other 
such portentous and manifold collisions, collis- 
ions in which the great poet shows his highest 
greatness by working them out in healthy har- 
mony with providential wisdom. Hamlet was 
brought into being for Hamlet's own sake ; and, 



HAMLET. 189 

breathing and moving before us in fresh pal- 
pitating life, his fellow men, by intimately con- 
sorting with him, can ever strengthen their 
moral as well as their intellectual being. 



BREVITIES. 



BREVITIES. 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 

Our habitation, the Earth, is not self-sub- 
sisting ; it moves in dependence on a fiery orb 
far distant : the Sun's light helps to feed the 
breath of our bodies. And shall we from the 
soil beneath our feet, from the dust into which 
our bodies dissolve, draw the breath of our 
souls ? If millions of miles off is one of the 
chief sustainers of our flesh, where should we 
look for the source of the spirit we feel within 
us ? 

The ideas of eternity and infinity are innate 
in the human mind as attractions towards per- 
fection, as indications and promises of incal- 
culable progression and elevation. 

Religion needs to be purified and steadied 
by culture and science. 
13 



194 BREVITIES. 

We must be realists, not dreamers : we must 
found our convictions on facts, not on imagina- 
tions which are dreamlike. Nothing is nobler 
than facts. Facts are God's ; imaginations 
are man's, and are only godlike, when they en- 
fold coming or possible facts, or adorn existing 
ones. 

Widely and kindly around us should we look 
as well as inwardly and upwardly, or we leave 
untenanted some of the heart's best chambers. 
Our breasts are large enough to entertain mul- 
titudes, and only when thus filled is our daily 
life a blessing. 

The increasing delight in natural scenery is 
one of the proofs that man is growing nearer 
to God. 

Possibly the mind cannot, in its most hope- 
ful and its most far-reaching imaginations, out- 
run its capabilities. Were it a law of being 
that the most fabulous flowers, unfolded in the 
sun of the heart's warmest day-dreams, contain 
the seeds of substantial realities ! 

Just ideas are the only source of healthy 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 1 95 

moral life. By them institutions are moulded, 
and to uphold institutions which ideas have 
outgrown, is to be destructive, not conserva- 
tive. They are the best benefactors of their 
race who can discern and apply the deepest 
ideas ; and thus the boldest reformer may be 
the truest conservative. 

To see things as they are, one must have 
sympathy with the spirit of God, whence all 
things come. Then can be discerned to what 
degree there is remoteness from divine design, 
and thus actual conditions be rightly judged. 

When you build selfishly, you build frailly. 
When your acts are hostile to the broad in- 
terests of your fellow-men, they are seed that 
will one day come up weeds, to choke your 
own harvest-field. 

One has at times a desire to cast away all 
the petty memories and imaginations that cling 
around self, and to bound off into the empy- 
rium of the Universal. Thus disencumbered, 
the Intellect and the Soul might make great 
discoveries. Is not this the secret of the clear- 
seeing glances of some of the mesmerized, 



I96 BREVITIES. 

that they are emancipated from the bonds of 
self, and for the time lifted out of the obscuri- 
ties of fleshly life, into the translucent sphere 
of the disembodied ? 

Beliefs imply non-beliefs. Creeds are com- 
pounded mainly of negations. 1852. 

Religion is the binding of the human mind 
to the invisible. A man is religious in pro- 
portion to the fullness wherewith he acknowl- 
edges this bond and to the degree in which 
his life conforms to the conditions implied in 
that acknowledgment. 



^iD* 



Humanity is ever yearning and struggling 
for its higher life. Religion, love, truth, jus- 
tice, liberty, these it instinctively seeks, gets 
first glimpses of, then views broader and less 
dim, then exalting convictions of the possi- 
bility of lifting its life into their dominion. 

Most people are Christians by inheritance, 
not by acquisition ; involuntary Christians, not 
Christians by will, individual feeling, and deed. 

Sin came into the world, not through the 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 197 

Devil, but through a nearer approach to God. 
It is darkness made visible by light. Before 
the light, no one knew of the darkness or felt 
it. Savages are not sinful. Sin is especially 
Christian, because the unfolding of the higher 
nature, through genuine Christianity, so raises 
the standard of life, that the lower nature is 
rebuked, as it was not before, becoming thus 
not only conscious of sin, but sinful ; for until 
there was the higher light, the lower nature 
deserved not condemnation for its low deeds, 
these being then not measurable by the doer. 

The wish to be free must not be confounded 
with a longing for exemption from restraint 
on appetite and willfulness, for such longing 
points downward ; whereas, desire for freedom 
is a striving upward. 

People selfishly ambitious think they are 
mounting a ladder ; whereas, with every round 
they touch they get lower, each step carrying 
them further from the zenith of innocence. 

Socrates denounced as the most fatal of con- 
ditions, " the conceit of knowledge without the 
reality." 



I98 BREVITIES. 

A fruit of partial mental development, of 
ignorance, and somewhat of arrogance, a fruit 
of the tree of evil, still much eaten and relished, 
is, that men strive to guide themselves by their 
imaginations and inventions and conventions, 
instead of by Nature's laws and precepts ; that 
is, by the shallow and mutable, the fragmentary 
and fugitive, instead of by the deep, the com- 
plete, the perennial. To pride, coupled with 
one-sidedness, much easier is it to imagine and 
presume than to discover and obey. 

To found your faith on dogmas, conceptions, 
imaginations, instead of seeking truth through 
meditative investigation, with direct, earnest, 
conscientious search, is as though a mariner, 
instead of looking to the sun and stars, should 
strive to guide his ship by the clouds, which 
are but shifting exhalations from the very sea 
whereon he is tossed. 

The simplicity and fewness of the physical 
elements wherewith, in the mineral, vegetable, 
and animal kingdoms, are compounded such 
countless varieties and degrees of life, prove 
the immense activity, resource, and sovereignty 
of the immaterial soul that wields and welds 
them. 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 1 99 

True religion develops and deepens the con- 
science : it helps the heart both to be just and 
charitable. 

Think of the exultation, tinged with a blush, 
there must be in the thought of one, a purified 
spirit, who looks back to earth to see there her 
name still linked to shame for deeds done in 
the flesh, which now her soul has repented of 
and purged away. 

A lively sense of moral responsibility neces- 
sarily involves dutifulness to our fellow-men, 
and thence dependence on them, and is the 
firmest, deepest, broadest, most indispensable 
foundation for individual worth and social well- 
being. 

Some people seem to think that all religion 
is shut up in churches. They might as reason- 
ably believe that all vital air is shut up in 
parlors and chambers. What is so shut up 
soon gets foul, and, unless daily refreshed from 
the great natural reservoir, breeds disease and 
death. 

The dog and the elephant are finitely cir- 



200 BREVITIES. 

cumscribed : they have no above and beyond. 
To live consciously amid the unseen and the 
unknown is the sublime privilege of man. 

The attempt to know the Infinite were a 
most futile misdirection of human faculties. 
As well attempt to perceive melodious sounds 
by the eye. Ideas of God come to us only 
through our emotions. Reason about what 
the emotions furnish we can profitably ; but 
most unprofitable is the attempt by reason to 
weigh, define, and fathom what, being purely 
objects of emotion, can neither be defined nor 
fathomed. 

Only when religious organizations are sources 
of intellectual culture and schools of instruction, 
do they a high service. A priest or minister 
of religion who is a dullard is of no account. 
The religious sentiment, being innate in man, 
manifests itself in all times and latitudes ; but 
that its spirituality have scope it needs union 
with intellect and moral thought. 

The power of the Bible is in its cordiality. 

Shame is a veil thrown by the spiritual man 
over the animal man. 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL, 201 

In early manhood some souls get locked up 
in ecclesiastical prisons, and the bolts rusting 
from the stale exhalations of stagnant theolo- 
gies, the prisoners languish their lives out in 
spiritual chains. 

Curs yelp at the sage as loudly as at the 
thief. 

A pity when men do not grow into light as 
they grow old, but mostly grope in a still colder 
darkness. 

No man who has a humane spirit, and leads 
a practical life, but will be often an uncruci- 
fied martyr, so saddened will he be, and some- 
times excruciated by the vice and suffering and 
anguish and injustice and inhumanity around 
him ; unless, like Oberlin, he withdraws into 
the mountains amid a primitive people, and 
thus restricts his life and his experience. 

The most fearful thing in life is the dread of 
death ; and this dread which theologies have 
fostered, is getting dispelled by Spiritualism. 

We do not value, or even know, our inward 



202 BREVITIES. 

worth and sacredness : we waste ourselves on 
the outward. 

Truth is a fruit that ever hangs ripening 
above us, expectant of our harvesting. 

There are words and doings so intensely 
natural that they seem supernatural. 

The dear ones gone are living links between 
us and heaven. 

Think of the interminable lengths of human 
relations in time and space ! 

The glass is not worn out by your looking 
through it ; nor is the soul. 

Some men despair of the future ; as if God, 
Nature, and Humanity were at the end of their 
tether ; as if Providence had in its hand no 
more trumps. 

In the Stoic philosophy Physics and Theol- 
ogy, or the study of the nature of things and the 
divine government of the Universe, went wisely 
together. Nature, — including in the term all 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 203 

that is cognizable by man, all physical, physio- 
logical, intellectual, psychical phenomena and 
laws, — Nature, in this full sense, is the Book 
. of God, a bible direct from his hand, not liable 
to erasure, interpolation, or falsification. Our 
printed Bible is at second hand, through human 
organs, colored by the minds through which 
the revelations passed. Nature is an ever- 
present, daily, living, teeming, beautiful, signif- 
icant, prolific, incorruptible revelation. 

Oh, the curse of egotism, the deadly poison 
of self-seeking ! A man is but the fraction of 
a man, until he goes out of himself. 

Creation is goodness in its most forceful 
phasis. To create is to be beneficent : to 
bring into being, to launch upon the boundless 
sea of life, is the highest act of love. Thence, 
to do acts of love, genuine acts, is to be crea- 
tive. Every, even the smallest kindness we 
do, is to work in harmony with, and in further- 
ance of, the divine creative energy. 

I have on my mind an image, brought from 
far childhood, of a rude woodcut, representing 
a man half buried in the ground and struggling 



204 BREVITIES. 

to get out. What was typified I cannot recall ; 
but I am reminded of this picture by contrast, 
when I see people and communities half buried 
in animalism and conventionalism, who are not 
struggling to get out, but sit in as much con- 
tentment as people can sit who, with all their 
self-satisfaction, can never utterly stifle the 
moanings of the soul in its slavery. 

A man's well-being is only then attained 
when he is in upward movement, the human 
organization being happily such that his ten- 
dency and necessity is, to be always changing, 
and, when in sound condition, to be always 
ascending. 

The maxims of La Rochefoucauld are an 
impertinence to humanity. 

The Bible is the wisest companion and guide 
that men have had in their darkened pathways 
through the ages. Beheld in comparison with 
the consecrated books of other Peoples, the 
Bible glistens. That men are now getting dis- 
satisfied with much of it, and have begun to 
criticize it, is a sign that their path is less 
dark. 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 205 

So late as the fifth century the heathen 
gods and Jesus were publicly adored in the 
same town. In the Sermon on the Mount 
is there any word about adoration, or about 
worship by the help of priests ? The whole 
system of worship as now almost universally 
practiced in Christendom is of heathen origin. 
Is there not, in formal outward worship, an in- 
evitable materialism, which arrests and absorbs 
spirituality. 

Sir Thomas Browne calls the soul, " that 
translated divinity and colony of God." 

The greatest gift to man, from God the giver, 
is love of truth. 

It is because the life beyond the earth-life is 
of such immeasurable importance to man, that 
in his less developed stages he has been a prey 
to priestcraft. Priests, pretending to be the 
privileged interpreters of the divine, have made 
man believe that they hold the keys to the pas- 
sage which leads to the mysterious future. 

To purge the world of lies, this is the great 
achievement of progress, — progress being the 



206 BREVITIES. 

effort of life to shelter itself under more and 
more truth. Theology, being based, not on 
high facts and absolute truth, but on man's 
fancies and changeful opinions and even preju- 
dices, has done much, in its obstinate limita- 
tions, to keep men false. Church-votaries it 
has filled with self-righteousness and hypoc- 
risy. 

Confucius said : rt An ocean of invisible in- 
telligences surrounds us." 

With semi-animal imaginations people figure 
up a sum which they call Deity, and then strive 
to believe that their deepest, noblest thoughts 
and emotions, and their whole being, are but 
fractions of this sum. 'Tis as though they 
were to stretch into the air a fantastic appa- 
ratus of wheels and pulleys, and to strive there- 
with to sway the motion of the earth. The 
only strength such an apparatus could have 
would come from the earth whereon it rests. 
Out of yourself you stretch wires towards 
Heaven, and then you persuade yourselves that 
they have been stretched from Heaven towards 
you ; and by the pulling of these wires you 
would direct your life. Who are the wire-pull- 



SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 207 

ers is as easy here to discern as in political 
jugglery. The proceeding is contrary to eter- 
nal law: it is an attempt to subordinate dy- 
namics to mechanics. 

The one only thing that is is truth : what- 
ever is not true is not. 

How were it if Copernicus, or some other, 
had not upset the Ptolemaic misbelief about 
the solar system, to which the Church held 
so obstinately ? Goethe looked upon the dis- 
covery of the revolution of the Earth round 
the Sun as the greatest, most sublime, ever 
made by man ; as boundless as beneficent in 
its consequences. 

The men who lead a second, inner, higher 
life are they who fecundate their age and the 
minds of other men in after ages. Only from 
this inner perennial spring flow streams of 
spiritual and intellectual wealth to enrich man- 
kind with deposits from their currents. 



II. 

LITERARY, ^ESTHETICAL. 

Poetry is not put into verse to please the 
ear : it is in verse because it is the offspring 
of a spirit akin to that which dwells ever in 
hearing of the music of the spheres. To 
poetry, rhythm is as natural as symmetry to 
a beautiful face. Genuine verse delights the 
capable ear, because, like the voice of child- 
hood or of woman, it is in itself delightful. 
Why does the setting sun, a lively landscape, 
a worthy deed, give enjoyment ? Because they 
speak to, and are in harmony with, our higher 
being ; and so is poetry, and therefore it too 
gives enjoyment. But to say, that the object 
of poetry is to please, ranks it with the shallow 
presentations of the showman. 

The Poet is an apostle of truth ; and the 
false can never be poetry. 

A good book is a distillation. 



LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 209 

In poetry much of the meaning is conveyed 
by the sound. Transpose the words of a fine 
passage, and you impair its import. 

In the style of Shakespeare there is oceanic 
undulation. In that of Corneille and Racine 
the surface is level, or if broken, it is not with 
billows. 

A sonnet should be like a spring, clear and 
deep in proportion to its surface ; and like a 
whirlpool, in a certain silent self-involved move- 
ment. 

Shakespeare's words, when boldest and rich- 
est, are but ambassadors, behind whom there 
is a greater than themselves : Racine's and 
Alfieri's, though not so erect and gorgeous, 
are the kings themselves ; they leave nothing 
untold, and give no impulse to the imagination. 

Good rhetoric is a good thing in a good 
cause. 

Rhymes should sit as lightly on verse as 
flowers on plants. 

14 



2IO BREVITIES. 

In English Prose where is there a diction 
so copious, apt, forceful as Carlyle's, at once so 
transparent with poetic light and so compact 
with a home-driving, idiomatic solidity, doing 
the errand of a thoughtful fervent nature with 
such fullness and emphasis ? 

Goethe goes out of himself into the being 
of nature and of other men : Wordsworth takes 
their being up into himself. These two poets 
illustrate sharply the difference between the 
objective and the subjective. 

In the plainest of Wordsworth's many hun- 
dred sonnets there is more or less of the fra- 
grance of high humanity. 

Some of Wordsworth's poetry is, as his per- 
son was, too gaunt : it wants a fuller clothing 
of flesh. 

A fit ideal embodiment of the Artist were 
a countenance upraised, beaming, eager, joyful, 
moulded with somewhat of feminine mobility. 

Thought is ever unfolding: a good thinker 
keeps thinking. 



LITERARY, JESTHETICAL. 2 1 1 

To write a good literary book, whatever the 
subject, requires the " instinct of the beauti- 
ful." 

Music is a marriage of the sensual with the 
spiritual: each is merged in the other. In 
perfect harmony there will be neither sensual 
nor spiritual, but the two will be made one in 
the fullness of life and purity. 

We talk of this man's style and that man's, 
when, rightly speaking, neither of them has a 
style. Style implies a substantial body of self- 
evolved thought. Now, from so few minds 
come fresh emanations, that most writings are 
but old matter re-worded, current thought 
re-dressed. Each one's individual mode of 
re-wording and re-dressing is, and should be 
called, his manner, not his style. In Writing 
as in Painting, every man, the weakest as well 
as the strongest, must have a manner ; but few 
can have a style. 1852. 

I write the opinion with diffidence, but to 
me it seems that Italian poetry wants depth : 
its roots are not sunk in the soil : too much of 
it is but ornamented versification. Dante bor- 



212 BREVITIES. 

rows from or imitates the Latin poets on every 
page. Petrarca's sonnets are as much an em- 
bodiment of what is called Platonic love as 
of passion for Laura. In Ariosto there is 
abundant fancy, but little poetic imagination. 
Alfieri's horizon is definite and earthly ; it 
does not stretch into the infinite. 

In the " Divina Comedia," the supernatural 
is not the framework merely of the Poem, it 
is the chief constituent of its essence. In the 
plaint of Francesca, in the beatitudes of Bea- 
trice, pathos and beauty are emblazoned by 
the glow from a supersolar sphere. To show 
them, and a crowd of other personages, alive 
in transterrestrial being, throbbing with human 
feelings, demands a poet of sensibilities rich 
and tender, and of graphic intellect. But the 
launching of the whole beyond the earth-orbit, 
this it is that sustains it and makes it poetical 
as a whole and in its multifarious details. As 
narrative of man's sorrows and joys while in 
the flesh, it were prosaic. The super-earthly 
firmament lends light to the picture. But for 
the supernal plane whereon every line rolls, and 
to which the reader is imaginatively lifted, the 
words, just as they stand, would be flat and 
opaque in nineteen lines out of twenty. 



LITERARY, MSTHETICAL. 213 

The men of letters who are contempo- 
raneously overrated, are the men of talent. 
Men of genius are liable not to be rated high 
enough in their generation. More accurate 
were it to say, that men of genius can be ap- 
preciated only by the few ; while men of talent, 
being within reach of the many, are by them 
self-complacently exaggerated. 

The vice of written histories is, that they 
are not History. 

Goethe's profound title to his Autobiography, 
" Dichtung und Wahrheit," Imagination and 
Truth, would be appropriate for every biog- 
raphy, memoir, or history that ever was writ- 
ten. 

Only the men who can originate are fully 
competent judges of what has been originated 
and done. Talent alone can never make a 
thorough critic. For that enough genius is 
needed to sympathize with genius. 

A beautiful face is fascinating more by what it 
promises than by what it is. To the beholder 
corporeal beauty suggests all other beauty. 



214 BREVITIES. 

When first gazing on a beautiful person, what 
an impertinence were a thought of his or her 
moral deformity. On the physical basis im- 
agination builds all other perfections. 

A fictitious story, to be worth attention, 
should have a heart in it, and be artfully un- 
folded, and be supported, not on slender tem- 
porary timbers, but on solid arches of thought 
and imagination. 

True Art helps and upholds the higher part 
of our nature : the lower being aggressive, 
needs check not spur. The ideal involves ele- 
vation through emotion ; and emotion, being 
caused by a stir of the unselfish feelings, is 
always purifying. There is no Art without 
some breath of the ideal. 

Poetry is the aromatic essence of life. 

The imagination unites, orbs, several into 
one : the fancy divides and individualizes. 

Thackeray and Dickens are so popular in 
England (and America ?) on account of their 
thoroughly English natures, both being some- 



LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 21 5 

what material and matter-of-fact, with a strong 
earthy .flavor, and not finely imaginative. 

Some minds are filters of other men's 
thoughts. They add nothing : they clarify 
what passes through their pens. 

The motion of a deciduous cypress illus- 
trates grace. Under a breeze the whole stem 
sways, animating every branch and spray with 
its own slow, stately, reserved movement, which 
seems to come from within. 

To those critics who, totally lacking poetic 
imagination, yet pretend to a fine ear in poetry, 
may be applied a " thought " of Pascal : " On 
ne consulte que Toreille, parcequon manque 
de occur." And the want of soul makes the 
ear untrustworthy. 

The sun-fired focus of a lens consumes pa- 
per or wood, but falling on a diamond, makes 
it sparkle the more. So with books, under 
the focus of genuine criticism. 

Some poets one outgrows. Scott, Moore, 
Campbell, even Byron, if I read them now at 



2l6 BREVITIES. 

all, I read momentarily. Their verse is not 
deep enough, not compact enough with mind, 
that in maturer years we be enlightened by 
it, and thence delighted with it. Beneath the 
web of incident and sentiment and passion, 
there is not warp enough of thought. Their 
pages are not enduringly suggestive. Dimmed 
to the eye of manhood is the brilliancy they 
shone in to the eye of youth. Their words 
are too little swollen from inward sources of 
sensibility that many lines should glisten with 
inexhaustible meaning, as in Wordsworth, Cole- 
ridge, Shelley. Keats died at twenty-five, and 
yet, to men past sixty he is fresh, freshening. 

There are writers whose minds have no hori- 
zon : they do not let you see far, but keep your 
looks on near objects and on bounded pros- 
pects. 

The best business of the poet is, to spin 
golden threads between earth and heaven. 

No high literature can be produced or en- 
joyed but through delight in the true and the 
beautiful. 



LITERARY, jESTHETICAL. 2\J 

A great function of sensibility to the beau- 
tiful is, to be ever prompting a better, finer 
something not yet attained. 

In theatric pieces common reality is every- 
where copied ; hence flatness, and a necessity 
for accidents and extravagances, monstrosities 
even, to keep alive a sensuous attention. The 
Stage should always be ideal, in the sense that 
Shakespeare is ideal, that is, it should present 
the real exalted, spiritualized. Literal repro- 
duction is low literature. 

To the poet who is a thinker, to Wordsworth 
or Goethe or Shelley or Dante or Coleridge, 
metaphysical speculation, if he chooses to give 
in to it, is an unbending. Nothing draws upon 
the mental life like poetic creation. 

One of the great disappointments in Litera- 
ture is the coming upon the stars which show 
that the " Hyperion " of Keats is a fragment. 

Shelley balloons it too much. He ascends 
easily, gracefully, and then is swayed by scented 
breezes from an exuberant imagination. It had 
been a gain could he oftener have dipped his 



218 BREVITIES. 

mind deeper into the core of common things. 
He has too much elevation and not enough 
depth, — that is, not enough depth for his ele- 
vation. 

An elderly poet, who has written chiefly out 
of his fancy and memory, and whose borrow- 
ings are not the worst of him, may be called 
an exhausted receiver. 

The pages of some writers, like the discourse 
of some men, are prickly with self-conceit. 

The first question to ask of a new book is — 
Does it give out new light ? Are novel aspects 
won from old things ? or, better still, is it racy 
with original views and principles ? 

Men who have not the mental largeness or 
spiritual momentum to go out of themselves, 
who cannot lift them reverently towards a 
greater than themselves, are liable, if intellect- 
ual, to be pantheists. By this opaque doctrine 
they are blinded to believe that they are a 
part of the Godhead, in the sense of being 
identical with Deity. Whatever they may 
think, they do but shut themselves into them- 



LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 219 

selves, and therein see but themselves, and 
that darkly. 

Anybody, with a pen in his hand, can write 
about a given subject : few can write into it. 

Common sense should lie at the bottom of 
all enterprizes, the literary and poetical as well 
as the practical and scientific. Good sense is 
the ballast of genius ; nay, we might say, it is 
the cargo itself out of which genius works its 
successes. 

To move on a high plane of sentiment and 
thought is a privilege of the personages of 
Shakespeare. 

" Great thoughts come from the heart/' says 
Vauvenargues. 

Hardly anywhere have we education, prop- 
erly speaking ; that is, an educing, a drawing 
out of the inward powers. We teach, we do 
not educate ; we inculcate, we do not unfold ; 
we shape more than we dilate. 

By the rarely beautiful we are subdued, over- 



220 BREVITIES. 

powered. In its glow we feel that there might 
be a degree of it on which we could not look : 
the mind would be smitten and blasted, as the 
body may be by a flash of physical lightning. 

In order to give life to their straight lines, 
the Greeks drew them with the hand and not 
with a rule. 

That is never a bad book which sets us to 
thinking ; but that is which makes us feel 
wrongly. 

Capacity of admiration, delight in admira- 
tion, is essential to the poet. When a poet 
ceases to be capable of admiration, he ceases 
to be a poet. 

How much is from himself, and how much 
has he drawn from others — these are cardinal 
questions to be put to him who offers us a new 
page of literature. Of genuine literature fresh- 
ness is the first quality. Along the lines should 
glisten a life imparted from the writer's inmost. 

Analysis is decomposition and, unchecked, 
leads to nullity. In literature as well as science 



LITERARY, ^ESTHETICAL. 221 

the synthetic force must counteract and balance 
the analytic. 

So much verse is but embroidery; some 
wrought with golden threads, some with silver, 
but mostly with fading silk. 

To put novels into the hands of the young 
is to fire the feelings through the imagination, 
which is like applying a match to the com- 
bustible materials you have collected for build- 
ing a costly mansion. 

In the lines of genuine poetry is ever per- 
ceptible the undulation inherent in life; and 
this however calm may look the exterior. So 
much verse being drapery, thrown with more 
or less art over a subject, there is in such none 
of that spring which only issues from interior 
movement. 

To deal competently with a subject the 
writer must first get into its centre, so as to 
write from within it 

To the brain-fibre of literary men may be 
applied the distinctive epithets of the cotton- 



222 BREVITIES. 

planter to his crop : short staple, medium, long 
staple. 

Metaphors give spring and buoyancy to sen- 
tences, widen the horizon, let in light and air, 
draw the reader from too close a look on the 
ground before him, and when fresh and ap- 
propriate, lift the style at once into significance 
and luminousness. 

A profound characteristic of divine govern- 
ment is the i?idirect means for compassing ends. 
To work by indirection is to work after the 
method of Providence. If to the selfish and 
the sensual I hold out immortality as a threat, 
I abuse it and misuse them : if through per- 
suasion of its reality I bring their minds into a 
broader, freer state, I use it wisely and serve 
them. Art acts indirectly : it lifts the mind to 
a higher mood, and out of that springs the will 
and the power to do higher things. 

Kant has a fine definition of the naif : 
" Nature putting Art to shame." 

To say a good thing fitly, demands some 
poetic gift. 



LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 223 

When you come upon a poetic sparkle you 
feel suddenly illuminated. 

So much verse has shallow roots. 

Poems differ much one from the other in 
what may be termed their specific gravity. 
For example, " The Burial of Sir John Moore 
at Corunna" has much more specific gravity 
than Campbell's " Battle of the Baltic." 

Profoundly does Sir Egerton Brydges say : 
" There is implanted in the poet a spiritual be- 
ing, which adds to the material world another 
creation invisible to vulgar eyes." 

The description of Valeria by Coriolanus 
vividly exemplifies poetic imagination : — 

" Chaste as the icicle, 
That 's curded by the frost from purest snow, 
And hangs on Dian's temple. " 

The drama, the poetic drama, clings closest 
to the heart ; clips the man in its arms ; is one 
degree less removed from the inmost. 

Deep in the personality of the poet a poem 



224 BREVITIES. 

must have its roots, in a soil rich and mellow. 
Out of himself it must come, not out of his 
memory and fancy. 

A poem demands roundness, a circular com- 
pleteness in itself and in its parts, such organic 
fullness that there be naught but lines like 
those of the egg, all representing a living ro- 
tundity, a palpitating unity. 

The moral of a poem should lie at the bottom 
of it, like the stones of a limpid stream. Look- 
ing intently, you see the stones, solid and still, 
the basic boundary of the stream. By them 
its pureness is preserved when the water 
courses rapidly ; for were they not there, the 
forceful rush would stir the mud beneath, mak- 
ing the whole current turbid. 

At the core of all verse there should be emo- 
tion, sentiment, or however may be called the 
offspring of healthful sensibility. The intellect- 
ual part of poetry should be but the transparent 
medium through which you are enabled to be- 
hold the treasures of feeling, as you gaze at 
precious solid things that lie 'at the bottom of 
clear water. 



LITERARY, MSTHETICAL. 225 

Utterance is the one end of a poetic thought, 
whose other end is deep in the soul of the poet, 
— at times so deep that he himself knows not 
where it ends. To take in the full meaning 
and beauty of such verse, the reader must 
follow it into the depths whence it shoots. 
Thence it is that the best poetry is slow to be 
recognized. 

Poetic genius is a lively soul uttering itself 
through the organ of the beautiful. 

Tennyson is one of the poets who, like 
Virgil, have more art than inspiration. 

Goethe says, there is poetry which is null 
without being bad ; null, because it has in it 
no fresh substance ; and not bad, because the 
writer had, from familiarity with genuine mas- 
ters, fine forms ever present to his mind. 

It is safe to judge a writer by the company 
he keeps; that is, the thoughts he habitually 
entertains, and the authors he likes most to 
hold communion with. 

That only is literature, in the refined sense, 
is 



226 BREVITIES. 

which continues to be read : it so continues, 
because it embodies in the best form the best 
thoughts of the best men. 

A man's mental tools have their finest edge 
put upon them by his sensibility to the beauti- 
ful. Many subjects he cannot penetrate at all 
without this sensibility, and into all he strikes 
the deeper for its edge. 

The poet deals with the new, with what is 
freshly formed and forming within him ; the 
man of understanding with what is old, fin- 
ished, hardened. 

In the best literary work there is a great 
deal of spiritual joinery. 

Art implies fine nature well tilled : with all 
your tending you cannot have exquisite flowers 
without good soil. 

In the fervor of work Shakespeare had little 
thought of style ; writing out of a mind so full 
and so poetical, style was a power inseparable 
from his utterance. When he had written a 
scene or act he went over it, and then he had 



LITERARY, MSTHETICAL. 22*J 

a thought of style, and made changes to give 
additional depth, light, buoyancy. 

Sense of beauty does not gild the variegated 
worlds of thought, feeling, and perception ; for 
gilding is too shallow, artificial, and perishable 
a process to typify the action of this great sen- 
sibility, It illuminates with unexpected joy 
some of the darkest throes of human move- 
ment, suddenly lights up with hopeful hue 
thoughts and deeds that a moment before were 
black with gloom, like mountain-peaks, emerged 
from storms, suddenly shone upon by the calm 
beautifying sun. 

In Hallam's " Literature of Europe during the 
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centu- 
ries," there is shown a sound, but not a fine, 
still less an active sensibility. Now an active 
sensibility is one — might it not be said the 
chief one ? — of the pre-requisites for a good 
style. 

Personages, characters, make a drama, and 
to make it they must be marked individualities, 
not mere labeled mouth-pieces. 



228 BREVITIES. 

Out of the extemporaneous flow of his men- 
tal abundance, Shakespeare enriches barren- 
nesses, peoples wildernesses. 

In writing, especially in poetry, the transi- 
tions are vital ; and most vital are the transi- 
tional leaps, which only genius can make. 

In writing, how few styles have nerve and 
sensibility ; without these the best and highest 
style is not reached. 

In some minds there are no recesses, where 
stores, often unconscious stores, lie waiting for 
their occasions. 

Poetry without personality is thin. To bring 
forth his personages, the mind of Shakespeare 
was big with humanity. When Shakespeare 
had dramatically given birth, his being was en- 
larged ; he felt himself reempowered by the 
soul wherewith he had imbued his creation. 

Poetry needs primarily the sequence of feel- 
ing ; and this sequence only flows from a full 
inward spring. 



LITERARY, JESTHETICAL. • 229 

That there be a poem, strictly a poem, the sub- 
ject should have a rooted steadiness, an internal 
repose, a generic solidity. u Aurora Leigh " and 
"The Gypsey," works of poetic genius though 
they be, are too tremulous with feeling, too un- 
steady with superficial incident. They are like 
a fine head sculptured out of conglomerate ; the 
vision is confused by the want of unity and 
purity of surface, and the lines and outline are 
broken by the shifting variety in color. 

The scholastic, mediaeval system of educa- 
ting through Greek and Latin, is the superficial, 
hollow system. Little more than a thin shell 
is imparted. The learners get no Sophocles, 
no Virgil ; no, not one of them in twenty. They 
do not even get possession, practically and 
permanently, of the languages in which Sopho- 
cles and Virgil wrote. A teaching not super- 
ficial, but penetrative and procreative, would 
be to take up Milton or Wordsworth, and lay 
his language, his thought, his poetry, open to 
the hearer. Aye, but who can do this ? How 
many professors in all our colleges and univer- 
sities (so called) can deal in thoughts, ideas, 
expression and poetry, with critical discernment 
and mastery ? But such teachers, teachers of 



23O BREVITIES. 

literary insight and range, are just what are 
wanted in our higher institutions of educa- 
tion, and these institutions, wanting such teach- 
ers, are but nominally high. 

The first requisite for simplicity of thought 
and style, is truth of feeling. 

There is no best poetry without flights, with- 
out steady, sinewy soaring up to plains where 
gleam lights spiritual, that flash new meaning 
upon life. 

In poetic creation the feelings use the intel- 
lect as their instrument ; in poetic composi- 
tion the intellect uses the feelings. Schiller 
was less of a creator than Goethe, and more of 
a poetic composer. 

Whatever he handles, the true poet illumi- 
nates with his own soul. 

Consider what goes into the making of one 
of Shakespeare's best similes or metaphors. 
To follow these sunlit wings to their teeming 
nest, there needs a kindred imaginative nimble- 
ness. 



LITERAR Y, MSTHETICAL. 2$ I 

In Wordsworth there is a poetic thoughtful- 
ness, and, in his higher moods, the polished 
compactness that results from this fine rare 
combination. His best passages have the 
smoothness and elasticity and roundness of an 
ivory ball. 

From the pen of none but a great meditative 
poet, could have come this profound thought of 
Wordsworth : — 

" Instruct them how the mind of man becomes 
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
On which he dwells. " 

Rhythmic flow, in some form, is part of the 
incarnation of poetry. 

Any feeling which can be lifted high enough 
to be married to emotion, becomes thereby fit 
for poetic use. Emotion results from move- 
ment in the higher, more generic feelings. 

They can hardly be called poets who have 
neither intellectual vivacity nor poetic glow 
enough to make flexible and distensive the 
bonds of words in which it is necessary to bind 
sentiment and thought. 



232 BREVITIES. 

The best of poetry is the mood it creates ; 
and herein the spiritually-minded poets are the 
most privileged. Not only do they tune the 
reader to a higher mood, but through his 
happy memory of this condition, they draw him 
back to their page, which, embalming in fit 
melody the better life of the mind, grows never 
stale. 

Poetic ornamentation, like the relief on a tea- 
pot, is hollow. 

Having no rhythm in their thoughts, the 
poetically unimaginative try to make up for 
this cardinal want with metrical smoothness ; 
but smoothness causes no radiance, that pro- 
ceeding only from internal self-kindled fire ; 
and radiance attests poetry. In their verse 
there is no sign of bemastered emotion, of full 
feeling wrought in its plastic warmth into 
graceful strength. 

For a word that is prosaic you can only get 
a poetic by going farther and deeper. 

Under the touch of warm active thought 
words are malleable. Thought is their com- 



LITERARY, jESTHETICAL. 233 

mander, and not only enranks them, but, like 
a Caesar into his soldiers, breathes into them its 
own spirit, so that the dull become lively, and 
the weak strong. 

By poetic imagination it is that recondite 
relations are detected. 

In the poetically imaginative stroke many 
rays flash together from various quarters upon 
a single point, making that point to sparkle 
with concentrated lustre. 

The composer says, * Here is a proper place 
for a figure," and straightway he manufactures 
one ; but figures, to do their duty of enlivening 
while they illustrate, should flame up out of 
the warm air that has just been liberated by 
the busy play of thought. In poetry the play 
of thought is everything. 

Of a truth, says Goethe, the head takes in no 
work of Art but in company with the heart. 

Through the music there is in him, the poet 
is enabled to make each natural thing utter the 
music there is in it. He is the enraptured 
spokesman of man and nature. 



234 BREVITIES. 

A good reader should have lights and shades 
in his voice, and what Sainte-Beuve calls in- 
sinuations. 

Excellence in style depends primarily on 
clearness in thinking, and fineness of percep- 
tion, this fineness implying some glow as well 
as health of sensibility. 

Style goes beneath the surface : manner is 
superficial. 

To write good poetry, the writer must have 
not only a good ear, but something very good 
to listen to internally. 

The office of poetry is to set forth the best 
possibilities of the feelings. The poet is poet 
by having within him more of the finer life of 
feeling. 

Sustained rapidity in poetry implies volume 
of thought, and thought so animated by feeling 
as to be urged ever fervently onward. 

Naught is perfectly simple : every thing or 
thought is more or less combined, complicated, 



LITERARY, jESTHETICAL. 235 

with others. The more intense the concentra- 
tion of many in one, the more life and power ; 
witness the similes and metaphors of Shake- 
speare. 

The want of the sense of the ideal is a chief 
cause of the unprogressiveness of certain tribes 
and races. 

The spontaneous has the highest quality. 
Foremost of human products is ranked a great 
Poem, the offspring of disinterested impulses 
and deep emotions, wrought into shape by in- 
tellect keen and clear. 

Mannerism is a declension resulting from 
one-sidedness ; but superior men are subject 
to it, because, although a defection from the 
purest style, it is a help to some who have more 
will than symmetry. It helps them with them- 
selves, by allowing their faculties freer play, 
through the indulgence of their stronger incli- 
nations, their disproportioned predominances 
of gift, which indulgence is the basis of man- 
nerism ; and, by thus giving more fluency and 
muscle to their movements, it helps them with 
readers. They write more and better than if, 



236 BREVITIES. 

by a severer curb on their proclivities, they 
subdued their utterance to the clear quiet tone 
of simplicity. This is exemplified in Carlyle, 
and, in a finer way, in Tennyson. 

Good poetry is the highest abstraction. The 
poet lives most in his mind ; for a mark of his 
being a poet is, that his mind be lighted up 
with visions and imaginations, which draw him 
to them as his best company. On his brain his 
need of the beautiful is ever breeding fresh 
figures and conjunctions ; and when these are 
vivid enough to take shape under the pen, he 
is abstracted from the earth and its forms, and 
swings up into an Empyrean of his own cre- 
ating, where he moulds other forms, and, out 
of his thought, forges other realities and pos- 
sibilities. 

In some poetry there is too much individu- 
ality, and not enough universality. 

In "Midsummer Night's Dream" it is as 
though in a calm summer night, standing on 
an eminence, were revealed to us by distant 
lightning, without noise, first in one quarter of 
the horizon, then in another, rich variegated 



LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 2$? 

scenery, every burst of glow laying bare a dif- 
ferent landscape, each landscape vying with 
each for the palm of beauty. 

The poet whose mind is become corrupt, as 
surely forfeits his creative birthright, as the 
rose its perfume through blight, or the fingers 
their cunning through palsy. 

Is there not more poetry in Bacon's Essays 
in prose than in Pope's in verse ? Pope said 
his say better in verse, because he had a met- 
rical gift, a gift, be it said, very different from 
the rhythmic gift, and as inferior to that as 
talent is inferior to genius. This metrical gift 
helped to polish and condense his thoughts, 
besides giving them the benefit of measured 
cadence and the piquancy of rhyme. Men who 
have " the accomplishment of verse" in larger 
measure than poetic imagination, will, with a 
slight infusion of poetry, seem to be better 
poets than they are, being to the many ac- 
ceptable from their very deficiency in the 
higher endowment, the major part of readers 
understanding and assimilating talent more 
readily than genius. 

The dramatic claims to be the highest form 



238 BREVITIES. 

of poetry, because, that a drama be good, the 
poet must condense into small space characters 
that shall be life-like and poetic, at once in- 
dividual and generic. Cardinal qualities of 
good dramatic poetry will be the liveliness, 
pointedness, rapidness, caused by interplay 
among individualities that are evoked, pro- 
voked, by contrasts and collisions, the wrest- 
lings of talk and the rivalries of action, action 
giving to words, phrases, and rhythm, a brisk 
percussive movement. Without characteriza- 
tion there is no genuine drama : the evolution 
of character through close, frequent, diversified 
contacts, is the essence of dramatic as dis- 
tinguished from lyric and epic treatment. But, 
besides sprightly individuality, springing, as it 
were, outward, there must be generalization, as 
profund as apt. Each personage, while distinct 
and individual, should be so thoroughly human 
as to be the easy mouthpiece of thoughts and 
sentiments that reach far. The weightier sen- 
tences will be unconsciously symbolical. 

From the mind of Shakespeare, thoughts, 
sentiments, men, women leap forth, each into 
its right place, aglow with life, and motion, and 
grace ; Shakespeare's brain is splendidly vivi- 
parous. 



III. 

CONDUCT, MANNERS. 

People in high places, who are not benef- 
icent, are out of place. 

In this " villainous world " there is almost as 
much unclean praise as malevolent censure. 

To the opinions and creeds received from 
their fathers, men hold as to the houses and 
lands they have inherited. Spiritual and ma- 
terial they lump together, treating him who at- 
tacks their opinions like him who steals their 
cattle, not perceiving that, instead of a theft, 
the destruction of opinions is a barter, whereby 
they may gain a hundred fold. Thoughts are 
subject to higher laws than things. 

In many an instance, when a man speaks 
of his conscience, conceit is mistaken for con- 
science. 

By continuous breach of the moral law, men 



240 BREVITIES. 

forfeit mental growth. Napoleon and Cromwell 
grew not wiser as they grew older. Their 
minds did not ripen, they hardened. 

Many of the old monasteries were founded 
by repentant reprobates ; and the early sins of 
their founders bore, in many cases, fuller crops 
than their later virtues. 

When a man readily gives ear to a slander, he 
betrays fellow-feeling with the malice whence it 
sprang. 

We seek happiness by outwardly heaping on 
our puny selves all we can, each one building, 
with the joint force of his intellect and selfish- 
ness, a reversed pyramid, under the which the 
higher it rises, the more he is crushed on the 
small spot his small self can fill. 

We are capable of life-long joy. Continuous 
varied fruition might be the sum of earthly 
existence. If our lives do not bring out this 
sum it is because we have misplaced, or mis- 
laid, or overlooked, or misreckoned with, some 
of the counters. 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 24I 

".You cannot serve God and Mammon : " 
nay, you cannot serve yourself and Mammon. 

The spokes of the wheel are helpless until 
bound together by the rim. 

Christianity promises such moral splendors, 
that men, refusing to credit these as an earthly 
possibility, translate its consummations to the 
superearthly sphere. Priesthoods have always 
fostered this incredulity, which opens to them 
the imagination as their work-field, where til- 
lage is much lighter than in a tangible soil. It 
is easier to saw air than to saw wood ; easier 
to put the wretched off with sanctimonious as- 
surances of celestial compensations, than to 
wrestle with earthly ills ; easier to preach of 
Heaven to come than to abolish a present Hell. 
The conscientious pastor knows how almost 
fruitless a task it is, when, not content with 
stale ritual repetitions and wordy exhortations, 
he labors practically to purge and vivify his 
flock. With all his will and toil he brings little 
to pass. His theological tools are dull : what 
steel there was in them has worn off. 1852. 

Children keep us at play all our lives. 
16 



242 BREVITIES. 

Rich, inactive people, whose main business 
is the spending of money, lose their sense of 
the value of time, and lead a lethean life. 

When we cease to learn, life loses its salt- 
ness. 

Allopathy is monarchical and ecclesiastical, 
inasmuch as it looks to something out of the 
body to cure the body. Under the action of 
drugs the body is passive, only rousing itself 
against their disturbing or poisonous action. 
Hydropathy is democratic : the body must bestir 
itself for its own salvation. Self-reliant, it must 
use, for its protection and re-instatement, its 
native internal resources. Allopathy, acting 
from without, and by means of foreign sub- 
stances, is one-sided, depressing, weakening : 
Hydropathy is all-sided, invigorating, purifying. 
Of a human body weighing one hundred and 
fifty pounds, one hundred pounds are pure 
water ; hence the efficacy of water as a curative 
agent. 

Idleness is the root of most evil ; and the 
minds that are busy to keep other minds idle, 
are doing the basest work that men can do. 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 243 

Give me the man who will not desert him- 
self. 

A human being can only be developed by 
work. He who will not work fails to fulfill his 
manhood : he who cannot work is less than a 
man. 

There is a logic in everything. The best 
knowledge is that by which this logic is mas- 
tered. 

Among our American rights is not the right 
of ignorance ; for ignorance is an absolute 
obstacle to self-government. To keep our track 
clear of this grossest obstruction, individual 
means are insufficient. For its own weal's sake, 
for its life's sake, the State must work actively 
against ignorance. 

A lie is the most hateful of things. We say, 
As true as the Sun. A lie is an eclipse of light. 
Were all people to lie, we should be shrouded 
in a moral darkness blacker than a starless and 
moonless midnight. 

Allowing for imaginative amplification, still 



244 BREVITIES. 

the chivalrous protection of women in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries denotes a 
vast enlargement of humanity at that period 
and, like all manifestations from the depths of 
human feeling, is a splendid promise sure to 
be fulfilled. 

Never did the greatness of a cause, or of 
ideas, or of principles, lift Napoleon above him- 
self. He was never inspired. 

The union of many weak threads makes a 
strong rope ; but the union of many fools be- 
gets not wisdom, but only worse folly. 

Lafayette was not a great man, but he was 
a man of great friendships. He was the friend 
of struggling America, the friend of freedom, 
and the friend of Washington. 

The Greek for man is antkropos, which means 
looker up. 

The human mind is so constituted that it 
must busy itself much with small things. If 
wholesome details are not within its reach, it 
will resort to frivolities, gossip, worldly petti- 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 245 

ness. Give it productive attractive work, in 
and with nature, and you forestall empty of- 
ficiousness, unprofitable busy-ness, morbid self- 
gnawing. 

Few minds are capable of broad generaliza- 
tion. Of prominent public men not one in 
ten has a comprehensive grasp and innate 
room for expansion. High places are mostly 
attained, not through mental superiority, but 
through impudence, activity, and talent for 
pushing. 

Love kindles love : hate engenders hate. 

Work is a tie between man and nature : it 
should be a bond of brotherhood among men. 
Through heartless unmitigated competition it 
is a source of envies, jealousies, hates. 

If a man shuts his religion up in a pew, or 
keeps it as a solitary solace, which sheds hardly 
a ray on others, he hides his light, not under 
a bushel, but under the smoke and ashes of a 
barren egotism. 

Whenever there is a deep disturbance and 



246 BREVITIES. 

broad displacement among the elements of any 
large whole, there will be violent explosive con- 
vulsions, in order to restore the equilibrium 
needed for health and even for life. Such dis- 
turbances imply strong organic vitality in the 
constituents. To this deep general perturba- 
tion, a people incapable of long development 
and high culture will not be subject, its ele- 
ments not being quick and various enough for 
large and pervasive breach of equilibrium. 
But for a great progressive people, ascending 
or already ascended, to a high civilization, equi- 
librium can only be restored by an English re- 
bellion of 1640, or a French Revolution, or an 
American civil war. 

So many men there are about whom the 
most interesting thing to other people is their 
last will and testament. 

The child is not only father to the man, but 
brother, too, most men in mature years approv- 
ing themselves childish. Their natures not 
having ripened and deepened with years, they 
continue to be willful and passion-governed, 
much busied with trifles, exhibiting an infantile 
tenaciousness for their petty pretensions, an 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 2tf 

unreasoning persistence in narrow opinions, an 
unabated interest in the ephemeral. 

The basis of cooperative success is sym- 
pathy. The conditions of wise associative work 
insure progress and purification. 

The soul, being endued with a beautiful body, 
seeks to improve the body by dress and adorn- 
ment, which may be looked upon as a con- 
tinuance of the soul's incarnation. This is a 
transcendental excuse for the time and pains 
women give to the arts of the toilet. 

" It has been noted," says Lord Bacon, " that 
those who ascribe openly too much to their own 
wisdom and policy, end unfortunate." A good 
epigraph for an essay on self-conceit. 

History abundantly proves that priesthoods 
exhibit supreme unscrupulousness, audacity, im- 
piety ; unique invention in torture and murder ; 
utter undutifulness and shamelessness in their 
means to gain and keep power ; the coldest 
selfishness ; unfailing readiness to subject the 
spiritual to the carnal, from motives of greed or 
ambition. 



248 BREVITIES. 

The best men of " society " have all travelled ; 
if not geographically, at least they have been 
far, and have learnt much from converse with 
all sorts of people, and from study of the deep- 
est and wisest pages. 

Men cling to the past, not because it is old, 
but because it is part of themselves. They live 
under and sleep under it, as under a roof that 
belongs to them. It becomes a form of that 
Proteus, selfishness. Nothing is more egotistic 
than stiff conservatism. 

Among some of the cultivated heads in 
America there prevails a spiritual egotism, 
whereby, instead of referring all things and be- 
ings (themselves included) up to God, they 
would draw God down to them, and would 
imbue Him with themselves. It is the reductio 
ad absurdum of individualism, subjectivity de- 
lirious ; and it sways #t times even sober sane 
men. Believing themselves to move under 
upright motives, some are inly demoralized 
(just as Robespierre was) by a self-estimation 
so intense as to be unconscious, impelling them 
to make their own thought and will supreme. 
When it happens that one of these is justly 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 249 

conscious of not being sordid or greedy or 
vulgarly ambitious, he is driven to still greater 
extremes by this very consciousness, which, 
through the subtle yeast of egotism, becomes 
the fomenter of only a deeper selfishness. He 
will push his theories and convictions into 
practice at whatever cost. One proof of the 
vice in the extreme principles of such men 
(and it is overwhelming proof) is, that in pursu- 
ing their ends they exhibit more hate than 
love. 

More people are kept from injustice by pru- 
dence than by principle. 

Taking medicine is another form of the 
weakness that makes us look out of ourselves 
for help. 

By some who would weigh Washington his 
nobility of nature is overlooked ; and some do 
not give prominence to his integrity and large- 
ness of soul. I have read one attempt to char- 
acterize Washington by a writer who thinks 
his chief quality was constancy ! 

If you wish to mark your contempt for a 
man, tell him a lie. 



250 BREVITIES, 

Introverted attention, referring to self all 
that is said, inattentiveness from want of sym- 
pathy, causing indifference of manner, these 
are signs of habitual inward self-engrossment, 
outwardly exhibited in bad manners, which 
have their chief source in too much self-regard 
and not enough regard for others, too much 
inlook and not enough outlook. Good manners 
are objective : many people are not only too 
subjective, but narrowly, churlishly subjective. 

To make a " good society " are wanted people, 
and a good many of them, who live, not upon 
their money, but upon their minds ; not even 
upon the money their minds may earn. 

The Egyptians used to call a library "the 
remedy for diseases of the soul." 

The larger and richer a nature is, the more 
objective it is ; that is, the more easily and 
fully are its sympathies enlisted for objects and 
beings beyond itself, and the more clearly can 
it see what is outside of itself. There is to a 
fly no objective, except where his feet stand or 
his mouth sucks. Exclusive subjectivity is 
egotism strung to intenseness. We are all too 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 25 I 

much contracted and heaped up into ourselves, 
having, as Montaigne says, our sight shortened 
to the length of our noses. 

All society, whatever its form, rests on work, 
grows out of work. 

The victim of envy is not the envi^, but the 
envi^r. 

In many men there is no echo to one who 
speaks wisely ; in some from want of thought, 
in some from want of the right kind or degree 
of feeling. 

In the personality of a man we take a loving 
interest, in proportion as in his doings or his 
writings he has expanded beyond himself into 
acts and thoughts of cordial value. 

We are ever interposing and obtruding our- 
selves between us and our good. 

To manners, as to literature, grace is a 
quality needed to complete them. Grace is 
from within. 



252 BREVITIES. 

If men would but be upright and fearless. 
Fear not, and work on at thy mental enlarge- 
ment, trusting to the Most High. Above all, 
fear not. He who fears is possessed with a 
devil, and a mean devil. 

Man is distinguished from animals by fore- 
sight, and man from man by foresight. All 
wrong, injustice, selfishness, is shortsighted. 

The worldly gentleman is apt to wear a coat 
of coldness, woven from within. 

Detractors are great levelers, downwards. 

In some people what is called manners is 
an excess of manner. 

Proportion is a mighty power. Onesidedness 
makes and keeps many people wrong in regard 
to great principles. 

Good intellectual faculties give sight : noth- 
ing but sensibility gives insight. 

So many able men are always seeking them- 
selves and not the truth. 



CONDUCT, MANNERS. 253 

Is not Guizot's a rather shallow hard head ? 

Life has many deep, rich rhythms which are 
as yet only heard by a few, through a rare in- 
ward hearing. 

Wishes, desires, that we ought not to gratify, 
we can turn to account for our good, if we will 
arrest their hurtful outward flow, and, by con- 
trolling, make of them sources of inward for- 
tification. 

In the long run everything depends upon 
the self. The inward of a man must be active 
and cooperative, in order that the best oppor- 
tunities be profited by, that the most pros- 
perous circumstances be not baffled or wasted. 

The spirit of Christian charity, of brotherly 
respect, is finely exhibited and characteristic- 
ally expressed in the following passage of a 
letter from Goethe to Lavater. Sentences like 
these are often met with in Goethe, and make 
one think of him as a higher Franklin. " Most 
thankful should we be that into every living 
being Nature has put so much healing power, 
that when there is a lesion anywhere it can 



254 • BREVITIES. 

knit itself together again ; and what are our 
thousandfold religions other than thousand- 
formed manifestations of this inward healing 
power ? My plaster does not suit thee, nor 
thine me : In our Father's apotheca are many 
recipes. So I have nothing to answer to your 
letter, nothing to contradict in it : but on the 
other hand much to place beside it. We 
should put our confessions of faith side by 
side in two columns, and thereupon build a 
bond of peace and tolerance." 

Especially in regard to the relations of the 
sexes, people will one of these days be in all 
their inward motions and outward doings as 
virtuous as a dressy congregation looks when 
it has just seated itself, some spring Sunday, in 
a carpeted pew-cushioned church that has a 
richly-paid rector. 

A man who has a sense of the ideal carries 
about with him an hourly educator. 



IV. 

MISCELLANEOUS. 

The mummies of Egypt are a type of un- 
enlightened conservatism, — a childish effort 
to perpetuate corporeal bulk, to eternize the 
perishable, to subordinate essence to form, to 
deny death. The result is a mummy. 

Hereditary oligarchs are puppets to whom 
motion is imparted by wires inserted under 
ground into the dead bodies of their fore- 
fathers. 

The remedy for England is to turn, not her 
waste lands to use, but her waste mind, her 
waste intellect and feeling. This, her priceless, 
inexhaustible domain, is half tilled in patches. 

In England so many people look as though 
they were waiting for my lord. 

On the continent of Europe it looks as 



256 BREVITIES. 

though government had been made first, and 
man afterwards. 

The great recent discoveries of Gall, of 
Fourier, of Priesnitz, all combine to make ap- 
parent the resources, the incalculable vigors, 
the inborn capabilities of man. 

Forms soon usurp upon the substance they 
were designed to hold. Ceremony and hy- 
pocritical corporeal salutations get to be a 
substitute for genuine politeness ; religion is 
smothered under ritual observances ; paper 
money drives out metal, which it was devised 
to represent. 

The Greeks and the English seem to be the 
only two nations possessing enough sap and 
vigor and fullness of nature to reproduce them- 
selves in distant soils, through colonists that 
swarmed off from the parent hive. 

Cherished should be the man whose mind is 
too large to be filled by creeds, and too manly 
to close itself against any wants of humanity. 
The mental home of the truest men is among 
principles, and principles are infinitely ex- 
pansive. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 2$J 

People nominally worship God one day in 
the week, and really worship Mammon seven. 

The Bible should be studied with activity of 
spirit. Its great heart will not beat but to 
the throbbing of yours. Just to read it pas- 
sively, traditionally, dulls the very susceptibility 
through which it is to be taken in. Not thus 
will you find God in the Bible. Who has not 
first sought Him in his own heart and in the 
life around him, will scarcely find Him there at 
all. God is not locked up in the Bible : He is 
at all times around, within us. Strive with 
Jesus to feel his presence. Then you may 
hope for promotion, purification, inspiration : 
then your heart may bring forth biblical chap- 
ters ; for, the best there is in the Bible came 
out of the human soul, touched to inspired 
utterances by the awakened inward divinity. 

The priests of Rome discourage intercourse 
with God through the Bible, which is already 
at one remove. Themselves they constitute 
the sole interpreters of the divine. The heav- 
enly will can only be expressed by distillation 
through the foul alembics of priestly greeds 
and ambition. Hence, where they long dom- 
17 



258 BREVITIES. 

inate, religion becomes materialized, and, for 
uplifting, soul-purging communion with God, 
is substituted abject, demoralizing, belittling 
submission to priesthood. 

An ape is a creature that has approached 
the gates of reason, and stands there grinning 
and jabbering in tragi-comical ignorance of 
his nearness to the regal palace. 

Envy, like venomous reptiles, can only strike 
at short distances. 

There is no deeper law of nature than that 
of change. 

Everything that we do being a cause, he is 
the most sagacious who so does that each 
cause shall have its good effect. This practical 
long-sightedness is wisdom, the want of it fool- 
ishness. To-days are all fathers of to-morrows, 
but like many other fathers, they sadly neglect 
their paternal duties. To-day, if it thinks at 
all, thinks of itself, and leaves to-morrow to 
shift for itself. Life is a daily laying of eggs, 
some to be hatched to-morrow, some next 
month, some next year, some next century. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 259 

Many are not hatched at all, but rot or are 
broken ; many come prematurely out of the 
shell, and perish from debility ; and thus that 
much life is wasted. Charity is long-sighted, 
selfishness is short-sighted. And yet, so de- 
fective is our social constitution, that a man 
may be long-sighted in using his neighbor for 
his own ends. Thus doctors — who are short- 
sighted when they take their own physic, which 
they seldom do — are long-sighted when they 
give it to their patients ; for the more of it 
these take, the oftener the doctor is called. 
It were a mistake to suppose that parsons are 
long-sighted because they set their minds so 
much upon the next world ; their long-sight- 
edness consists in directing other people's 
thoughts to that quarter, while from the super- 
mundane spectators they draw the wherewithal 
to be content with this. Lawyers are short- 
sighted when they encourage litigation ; the 
long-sighted know that the perverted passions 
of civilized men will bring grist enough to 
their mill without their stir. The man who 
sells rum is short-sighted, but less so than he 
who drinks it. Authors are very short-sighted 
when they write to please the public, instead 
of writing to please the truth. Expedients are 



260 BREVITIES. 

short-sighted, principles long-sighted ; and not- 
withstanding the apparent prosperity of some 
liars, nothing is so long-sighted as truth. 

We Americans let not the past accumulate 
upon us : we make clean work as we go. We 
keep the present lively, because we are ever 
snatching a new present from across the con- 
fines of the future. We are always " going 
ahead ; " that is, building up the future out of 
itself and not solely out of the past. We don't 
wait for the future : we rush in pursuit of it. 

Classification is the highest function of in- 
tellect ; it brings order out of chaos. It is 
both analysis and synthesis. The higher the 
department of universal life, the keener of 
course must be the intellectual insight that can 
detect its organic law. To order minerals is 
feebler work than to order morals. The man 
who classes, needs to have a kind of creative 
mastery over his material. He intellectually 
recreates. The savage, who has mastery over 
nothing, but is a serf of Nature, has no power 
of classification. 

To weave the wondrous form wherewith life 



MISCELLANEOUS, 26 1 

invests itself in humanity, the heart works 
ceaselessly, and every organ, member, part and 
particle of the living frame works, each joyfully 
in its sphere, in unison with the heart, for the 
maintenance of the common fabric. But a 
continuation and extension of the unconscious 
work of the heart and lungs is the conscious 
work of the head and hand of man, whose end 
is, to feed, to clothe, to lodge, to develop, to 
delight his body and his mind. All work, the 
unconscious and the conscious, is but life meth- 
odized, that is, life made more living, more in- 
telligent, and thence more productive. And 
thus work, which is the condition and result 
of life, becomes the means of its perpetuation, 
its extension, its elevation. All work may be 
delightful ; and as, the healthier the body is f 
the more joyfully and thoroughly the heart and 
its allies perform their unconscious task, so 
in a healthy social organization all work, the 
greatest and the least, ceasing to be repulsive 
and becoming attractive and delightful, would 
be proportionately productive. A consumma- 
tion this, not barely, most devoutly to be wished, 
but most surely to be accomplished, by that 
high work which the intellect exalted by love 
and faith is equal to performing. 



262 BREVITIES. 

Nature rejects with contempt hereditary aris- 
tocracy. 

In our present misorganized society helpless- 
ness is the condition, not of nine in ten, but 
of all The wisest and wealthiest are encom- 
passed by exposure, dangers, calamity. The 
most of what is done on earth is of our own 
making or allowing. Heaven is just, lets us 
do for our good or ill, and helps us when we 
help ourselves. Put we our shoulders to the 
wheel, the Hercules is instantly at our side. 
We make the beds we lie in ; not you or I, 
but you a,7id I, and all the you's and I's that 
surround us. Against our needs and woes you 
or I can do little, but you and I everything. 
Association, which has made banks and rail- 
roads, can do much better and higher. 

There is nothing that some people are more 
ignorant of than their own ignorance. 

Unsightly is an old face haunted by the vices 
of youth. 

Credulity is a characteristic of weakness. 
Imagination precedes Reason. Fancies are a 



MISCELLANEOUS. 263 

loose substitute for knowledge. Hence the 
unreasonable creeds of young nations, fastened 
upon them by priestcraft, whose criminal prac- 
tice it has been, and is still, by terrifying the 
imagination to subjugate the reason. The first- 
born of priestcraft was the Devil. 

Priests are ever shuffling over the leaves of 
old books : they seek God in traditions and 
hearsays, and the dim utterances of the livers 
of old ; they abide by the outgivings of obsolete 
mystics : they re-assert the beliefs of anti- 
quated seers : they grovel and grope in the 
darkness and dawn, to find stakes planted by 
the crude beginners of the world, to which, by 
grossest cords, they would bind to the past our 
forward-reaching souls. The future, too, they 
suborn and would monopolize. Out of imagi- 
nations that are shallow, unhallowed, meagre, 
foul, they would construct both the past and the 
future. That they may be paid for furnishing 
rush-lights, they cultivate darkness, and becur- 
tain with creeds and dogmas the human taber- 
nacle against the sun of truth. Those who ap- 
peal to the God of light, and to the upright soul 
of man, against their sophistications, and usur- 
pations, they crucify. Audaciously they dub 



264 BREVITIES. 

themselves the ministers of God, they who are 
especially not God's ministers but men's. Spir- 
itual insight, moral elevation, rich sympathies, 
these are the tokens whereby the divinely or- 
dained are signalized. Are candidates for any 
priesthood admitted or rejected by these signs ? 
Not by inborn superiorities of sensibility, but 
by acquired proficiencies, by intellectual adop- 
tions are they tested. This creed, these ar- 
ticles, this ritual, — do they accept these, then 
are they accepted. To be learned in humanity, 
a vivid learning, which the large heart imbibes 
without labor, this is not then - title ; but to be 
learned in theology, a lifeless learning, which 
the small head can acquire by methodical 
effort. They would live and make others live 
by the dead letter, and not by the living law. 
The dead letter is the carcass of what has been, 
or what is imagined to have been. The living 
law is what is : it is not written, it is forever 
in process of being written, on the heart of 
man by the hand of God. 

Disproportion is disqualification. Too much 
is unwieldy : too little is feebleness. A giant 
is of no more use than a dwarf. A man seven 
feet high finds his extra foot a daily incum- 



MISCELLANEOUS. 26$ 

brance. A man of more head than heart is 
dangerous : a man of more heart than head is 
a victim. 

In one of the " Latter Day Pamphlets," Mr. 
Carlyle asks tauntingly, What have the Amer- 
icans done ? — We have abolished Monarchy ; 
we have abolished hereditary Oligarchy ; we 
have sundered Church and State ; we have so 
wrought with our English inheritance, that 
most Englishmen better their condition by 
quitting the old home and coming to the new. 
We have consolidated a State, under whose dis- 
interested guardianship the cabined and strait- 
ened of the Old World find enlargement and 
prosperity. We have suppressed standing ar- 
mies ; we have decentralized government to 
an extent that, before our experiment, was 
deemed hopeless ; we have grown with such 
dream-like rapidity, as to stand, after little 
more than a half-century of national existence, 
prominent on the earth among the nations ; 
and this, in large measure, through the wisdom 
of political organization, whereby such scope 
is given to industry and invention, that not 
only are our native means profitably developed, 
but the great influx of Europeans is healthfully 



266 BREVITIES. 

absorbed. We have in seventy years put be- 
tween the Atlantic and the Pacific an Empire 
of twenty-five millions, who work more than 
any twenty-five millions on earth, and read 
more than any other fifty millions. We have 
built a State at once so solid and flexible, that 
it protects all without oppressing any. Our 
land is a hope and a refuge to the king-crushed 
laborers of Europe, and from the eminence 
above all other lands to which it has ascended, 
by our forecast, vigor, and freedom, it is to the 
thinker a demonstration of the upward move- 
ment of Christendom, and a justification of 
hopes that look to still higher elevations. 

Mr. Carlyle's sneers at our lack of heroism 
would be unworthy of him, from their very 
silliness, were they not more so from their sour 
injustice. Let any People recite its heroic 
deeds, on flood or field, since we were a nation, 
and we will match every one of them. And in 
the private sphere, where self-sacrifice, devo- 
tion, courage, find such scope for heroic virtues, 
our social life is warm with them : but this is 
no theme for words. For his unworthy ones, 
we deem well enough of Mr. Carlyle to believe, 
that, when disengaged from the morbidly sub- 
jective, and therefore blinding and demoraliz- 



MISCELLANEOUS. 267 

ing, moods, to which he is liable, he is ashamed 
of having printed them. It looks somewhat as 
though this passage had been written just to 
give us an opportunity of victorious retort, or 
to tempt us into an exhibition of our national 
propensity to brag, — a propensity, be it said, 
which is national in every nation we know 
anything of, whether English, French, German, 
or Italian. We only beat them in bragging, 
just as we beat them in ploughs and statues, 
in clippers and steamboats, in whalemen and 
electric telegraphs, in cheap newspapers and 
cheap government. They all do their best 
at bragging, and so do we, — and we beat 
them. 1852. 

The moral world is better lighted than here- 
tofore. Selfishness succeeds somewhat less 
grossly : conscience has a louder voice. 

Such is the power of relative proportion that 
the same chemical atoms, commingled in differ- 
ent ratios, give substances of most diverse na- 
tures. Of men the same holds good, and in a 
still higher degree. 

The truer religion is the simpler and more 



268 BREVITIES. 

silent it is ; but simplicity and silence suit not 
priestcraft. 

Never make pretentions which you cannot 
justify. Therefore never strive to seem young 
when you are not young : time will expose you 
to daily mortification. Time is vital to us : by 
trying to live against time we maim ourselves. 

The lawyer is retrospective : his masters are 
behind him : the authority of the past controls 
him : his studies are of the decisions of dead 
men and their interpretations of other dead 
men's ordinances. Thus his mind is apt to be- 
come inclosed within conventional juridical 
bounds. Hence lawyers are seldom great 
statesmen, the function of the statesman being, 
to grasp large present relations. The lawyer's 
domain is chiefly what has been : the states- 
man's what is, and what is to be. 

Man is of the vine nature : he puts forth 
tendrils that need props and supports in his 
fellow-men : and, failing these, he misses his 
altitude and proper prosperity, and droops and 
creeps. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 269 

When with thoughtful watchfulness we study- 
creation and its processes, we find true the re- 
mark of Playfair, " How much further reason 
may sometimes go than imagination can ven- 
ture to follow." 

The " cloth" of the clergy is too often cut 
into a cloak. 

Life is a universal boundless whole, whereof 
each one as a part is valuable in proportion 
to the quality of his relations to the whole. 

Satire implies a high state already attained 
and a higher attainable. Humanity is never 
satirized in its lower conditions. 

Between truth and freedom there is a close 
interdependence and union. Jean Paul says 
that to romance (or to lie) is derived from 
Roman, the word with this signification having 
come into use after the Romans had become 
enslaved. 

In air made foul by human exhalations, a 
material filth penetrates to the finest fibres of 
the brain, weakening and impeding the mind's 



27O BREVITIES. 

action. The difference between the " black 
hole of Calcutta" and many of our school-rooms 
is this : in the black hole scores died in a few 
hours : from the school-rooms hundreds go 
forth to die in a few years, from effects of the 
same cause. A building, especially a public 
one which is liable to crowds, should be a 
breathing organism, ever, like the lungs, throw- 
ing out used air and drawing in fresh. 

Present intuitions of genial deep-thoughted 
men, even of the deepest, are in part a fruit of 
past intuitions, culture generating an atmos- 
phere whereon the largest brains are uncon- 
sciously fed. 

In the frenzied heat of brain-fever France 
engendered Marat and Robespierre, deformed 
monsters of self-sufficiency, whom in her de- 
lirium she hugged as comely healthy children. 

Some people are practically honest from rev- 
erence for property. They will sin against 
you or me, against truth, against the Holy 
Ghost, but not against property. 

Napoleon was a colossal torso. 



MISCELLANEO US. 2 7 1 

From one of the pages of Lacordaire's " Con- 
ferences de Toulouse," I copy this tremendous 
sentence : " Mahomet, initie a l'Evangile, a re- 
vetu de chair la felicite souveraine ; et ce 
fantome de son Paradis persecute encore la 
honteuse imagination de ses croyants, seul 
peuple qui n'ait pas connu la pudeur." 

Reason should always hold the reins of the 
mind. If they are loosely held, the mind 
stumbles, or runs off the track, or runs away. 

We speak of " here and hereafter ; " but 
man's life is an everpresent here, an everlast- 
ing now. The hereafter is ever turning into 
here : the future is forever becoming now. 

Few men have the kind and degree of mental 
vitality needed to throb with the life-currents 
which slake and vivify the organism. The 
minds of most men being rather mechanical 
and material than dynamic and psychical, to 
them the human organism is too much a 
mechanism. Medical practitioners work by 
rule and routine more than by insight and law. 
They can analyze the dead blood : they can- 
not track the pulsing life-stream. Few of them 



272 BREVITIES. 

fully apprehend the plastic power of nature ; 
and hence they so often pull down where they 
should build up, mutilate or destroy where they 
should save. 

The next generation will have to reverse the 
accustomed phrase at the beginning of many 
biographies, and say, " His parents, though rich, 
were honest." 

The universally innate human religious ap- 
titude was in the Semitic people intensified by 
the aridity of part of their soil and the neigh- 
borhood of vast deserts. By the daily malefi- 
cent presence of these, their helplessness and 
their dependence on the unseen were brought 
fearfully home to them, and incessantly. From 
the want of resources and of breadth in their 
territory there was among them an enforced 
simplicity of earthly occupations, which left 
them leisure, and gave them disposition, to fill 
their minds with thoughts of the power that 
seemed to press on them in the desert and to 
stint them in their fields and streams. Thence 
their notion of Deity was more of might than 
of beneficence. Their God was a God of 
anger rather than of love. Their conception 
of a life beyond the grave was null, or faint. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 273 

There are people in whom the best thing is 
their appetite for dinner. 

Equality before the law, man-made law, is 
one of the great conquests of latter times, — a 
conquest bearing in its train inestimable prof- 
its. A relative equality is this, equal rights 
in presence of all human tribunals ; and such 
impartiality is a prerequisite for full libenty. ' 
But absolute equality is an absurdity, and 
men's attempt to establish it is destructive of 
free development and free use of faculties de- 
veloped, a revolt against nature involving tyr- 
anny over man. Men are born with unequal 
gifts, moral as well as intellectual, and this 
inequality involves vast consequences, personal, 
political, and social. Moreover, the wider the 
range of this inequality, the better the ma- 
terials for a solid and attractive and elastic 
social structure. 

To show man's innate capacity of goodness, 
to exhibit him as born of God and not a cross 
between God and the Devil (as he is repre- 
sented by what is called Christian theology), 
this is a task for the present and coming gene- 
rations. 

18 



274 BREVITIES. 

Providence is large in its designs, and uses 
minute instruments. Common statesmanship 
is small in its designs, and uses large means 
for shallow plans. 

When you talk to a Romish priest and, in a 
less degree, to a Protestant clergyman, you feel 
that you are talking, not to a self-directed in- 
dividual man, to a whole human being, but to 
the fraction of a partial sum of men, to a bit 
of a segment of a limited circle, to the cog of 
a wheel, whose action is circumscribed and 
defined by its position. And is not this the 
case when talking to most men, lay as well as 
clerical ? Few but are mere fragments of 
humanity, cabined in set opinions, tethered to 
inexorable creeds and constitutions. 

The Puritans were a one-sided race, and 
that one side was much on the side of self. 
Yet, in modern development, what a great and 
indispensable part they played. 

The man who cannot learn new thoughts 
becomes stagnant. If he lives in a progressive 
community he is left uncomfortably behind, he 
and his. The generations that stride forward 



MISCELLANEOUS. i 275 

walk past him or over him. Thus it was with 
the French noblesse after 1789; and so it is 
now with " old families " that will not learn. 
In these electric times they are thrust from 
their thrones by families that have aptitude for 
new things. An old race that cannot take in 
new principles thereby shows that it is ex- 
hausted, is become mentally barren. Witness 
China, and the East generally. 

The life of man on earth is but a beginning ; 
and beginnings are tentative, crude, imperfect. 
Hence, blunders, vices, crimes ; and hence, men 
being so frail and shortsighted, so many bad 
men are allowed to get into high places. 

Is not the addiction to rites and cermonies, 
the attaching of essential importance to forms, 
a sign of the want of sensibility ? An inward va- 
cancy manifests itself in an outward ostentation. 

Noteworthy is it how our civilization is built 
on piles, so to speak, resting so much on human 
imaginations and ordonnances, on ecclesiastical 
dogmas and legislative enactments. Out of a 
crude natural state man rises gradually into a 
cultivated artificial state. Out of this, too, he 



276 BREVITIES, 

will pass, and through self-projections and 
emancipations reach the ripe natural state, 
where dogmatic theology and jurisprudence 
and all makeshifts will have been outgrown, 
and humanity will securely rest on the God- 
given law. 

The imagination is the truest of mental 
powers. It reveals to us our inmost self ; and 
so truly, that we dare not make known all its 
promptings and pictures. 

Dreary and dark is the outlook of the ma- 
terialist : closed is his mind against the light 
and warmth of higher spheres, which poten- 
tially belong to mankind : to him there come, 
from the unknown vast, no flashes too brilliant 
to be borne, save for a moment, by earthly 
man, hinting at and prefiguring radiant trans- 
earthly possibilities. When in " Achilleis " 
Goethe describes the Hours as lavishing upon 
and within the abode of Jupiter " so much light 
and life that man could not have borne it, but 
the gods it delighted," he depicts the life of a 
higher state of being, which low-thoughted 
materialism will not entertain, but something 
of which there must have been at all times 



MISCELLANEOUS. 277 

many to conceive, or man would have groped 
forever in the caves of savagery. Had man 
not been the subject of restless spiritual up- 
Teachings, of instinctive heavenward aspira- 
tions, no philosophical plane could ever have 
been reached ; and thence, no materialist would 
have gained the culture which enables him to 
strive to span the universe with his tape-line 
of phenomenal sequences, to seize the mystery 
of being through chemical manipulations, to 
weigh the essences of life in grocer's scales. 

In 1456 Pope Calixtus III. issued a bull 
against a comet. The absurd impotence of 
this proceeding was some antidote to its blas- 
phemous venom. The four centuries that, 
since the day of impious Calixtus, have rolled 
themselves out of the bosom of eternity, spark- 
ling more and more with the divine light of 
poetic and scientific revelation, have left un- 
healed, untouched, the presumptuous vision of 
the Papacy. Its bad distinction is that it will 
not, cannot, be enlightened. In Nature, in 
Civilization, in Christendom, it stands alone in 
stolid unchangeableness, self-exiled from the 
Paradise of progression by ecclesiastical ambi- 
tion, by self-worshipping loneliness. As bias- 



278 BREVITIES. 

phemous to day as in the age of Calixtus, it 
looks upon every free-thinking, free-speaking 
mind as a cometary intrusion, a menacing irreg- 
ularity, a defiant insolence, whose light and 
being it would, if it could, extinguish by a bull ; 
in its arrogant irreverence blind to the deep 
religious fact, that every such mind is launched 
by the same infinite Might that projects comets 
and places the stars. How many Protestants 
are there who denounce Popery, and yet prac- 
tice its blasphemy against free thought and free 
speech ? 

In every department of work the highest 
achievement implies the organizing, coordinat- 
ing power. Without it a man can hardly be 
great, whether he be scientist, statesman, or 
poet. 

The power of capital lies in the intelligence 
which creates and preserves it. 

The minds of many people are so imprisoned 
in narrow, false theologies that they look out 
upon the world as a convict does through his 
prison-bars. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 2?9 

So many men are afraid of God ! Most tragic 
condition ! They stick to the old man-made, 
miry, thoroughfares, too timid to strike into the 
God-given paths that open on all sides, smil- 
ing and glittering with safe solicitations, with 
promises as brilliant as sure. Disabled, hectic 
theologies they prefer to science, contracted 
dogma to expanded reason. More pitiable are 
they than monkeys, who stand senselessly 
chattering before the temple of Thought and 
Speech, and have no power to enter. 

The men who, lacking the insight which 
comes chiefly from sympathy, are by nature 
incompetent to grasp and appreciate the pro- 
found principles and springs of life and motion 
that underlie and energize all being, especially 
human being, these are the men who put them- 
selves forward to read and interpret the secrets 
and the will of the prime Motor, men for the 
most part as limited in intellectual range as in 
sensibility. 

One thing keeps fresh a day, another a 
month, another a year, another a century, an- 
other a thousand years : truth, justice, love, 
keep themselves forever fresh. 



28o BREVITIES. 

A man cannot better spend his life than in 
learning how to live. 

Oriental despotism dominating the law and 
ritual of the Jews, minute directions were pre- 
scribed for all individual doings, compressing, 
smothering personal liberty and self-direction 
The tendency of the spiritual teaching of 
Jesus was to emancipate men from this priestly 
domination and interference. 

There should be no hostility between the- 
ology and science ; for theology, or knowledge 
of the ways and will of God, should be, and, if 
sound, will be and must be, founded on science ; 
that is, on sifted, methodized knowledge. 

Violent death is a proof of incompleteness, of 
failure. Two men or two armies, destroying 
one another, show that man is not yet out of 
the phase of animalism, and needs farther purg- 
ing through swift destruction. 

Human society is founded on sensualism ; 
sensualism in a healthy sense. The structure 
is weakened, or threatened, or deformed, when 
the foundations obtrude above the ground. 



MISCELLANEO US. 2 8 1 

Water is more strengthening than whiskey, 
more exhilarating than wine. 

Every dollar of capital extant is the product 
of work, work of muscle and work of mind ; 
and a part of the function of capital, its chief 
part, should be, to react upon the mind and 
muscle of a community, for the profit, improve- 
ment, and elevation of all its members. The 
material is the creation of the spiritual, and 
should serve its maker. 

No new thing under the sun ! Everything 
under the sun is new, except what is dying or 
dead ; and death itself is but a passage to a 
new condition of life. Whatever has life re- 
news itself momently : when it ceases to renew 
itself, it is losing its present form of being. 
Constant renewal is the very life of being. 
Every sunrise is new, every soul is a new soul. 
Because all men and things are alike, each is 
therefore not the less new : no two among the 
myriads that are and have been are precisely 
alike, and this infinitude of unlikeness is a 
token of the newness of each. Here is ex- 
hibited the boundless prodigality of mate- 
rials and resources at command of the sleep- 



282 BREVITIES. 

less productiveness in the animating principle. 
" Behold, I make all things new." Timoleon 
was a new man : Are William the Silent of 
Orange and Washington, because they bear 
strong likeness to Timoleon, less lustrously- 
new ? Was not Patrick Henry a new orator ? 
Was not Shelley a new poet ? Unceasing cre- 
ativeness is the very essence of the originating, 
sustaining, informing, Mind. Hence the daily, 
hourly rejuvenation of the earth, and all that 
is on it, by the pauseless pulse of the Eternal 
SouL 



THE END. 



